SEO Podcast The Unknown Secrets of Internet Marketing

Unpacking the Google Data Leak: Fact or Fiction?

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Unpacking the Google Data Leak: Fact or Fiction?

Interested in exploring the Google Data Leak without doing all the research? We do the research for you and give you the highlights. Let's dive into the buzz surrounding the alleged Google data leak that has sent shockwaves through the SEO community together. And get to the bottom of is the leak authentic, and what it reveals about Google's ranking signals. 

Join us as we do the research, and find out what it says, separating fact from fiction and what we know is true from data sets in the field we can replicate. We will also discuss actionable steps to safeguard and strengthen your SEO and Content strategies to stay ahead of the competition.

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The Unknown Secrets of Internet Marketing podcast is a podcast hosted by Internet marketing expert Matthew Bertram. The show provides insights and advice on digital marketing, SEO, and online business. 

Topics covered include keyword research, content optimization, link building, local SEO, and more. The show also features interviews with industry leaders and experts who share their experiences and tips. 

Additionally, Matt shares his own experiences and strategies, as well as his own successes and failures, to help listeners learn from his experiences and apply the same principles to their businesses. The show is designed to help entrepreneurs and business owners become successful online and get the most out of their digital marketing efforts.

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Speaker 1:

Howdy. Welcome back to another episode of the Unknown Secrets of Internet Marketing. I am your host, matt Bertram, and here we teach you how to leverage online digital strategies to catapult yourself to the top of the search engines and rake in all the traffic and the lion's share of the new leads. Because, as you know, if you are not at the top of the search engines, you will not get traffic. That's why so many people talk about SEO not working, even if you're on the first page. There's a huge difference between being on the top of the first page, even the middle. Really, the lion's share goes to the top three. I think it's like 67% of all leads go to the top three position on Google. So if you're not there, give us a call. We can help you step it up. Or listen to this podcast and do it for yourself. Or, even better yet, we're launching a training program at the end of this month, so stay tuned for that. And if you want me to help you with the strategy, but you execute I want to teach you how to fish. I want to teach you how to do digital marketing. You can certainly string it together with everything in this podcast. Check out our back catalog.

Speaker 1:

Today we're going to be talking about the Google data leak, so let's go ahead and jump into it. All right, so I have a ton of different articles over here. I am going to work on learning how to use these tools a little bit better and start to create some videos and transform over to YouTube, because there is just a ton of news out there. So this will be kind of a curation style podcast. I like to skip a lot of things that are just blah and pull out the interesting and insightful topics. So the first thing that I'm going to say is and this will be in the show notes there's an article about this data leak that's, I I think, pretty dang important, and Search Engine Journal puts out this article and it's just on the clarification of the data leak, like was it leaked by a Google staffer or not? Basically is what they're saying? It's on a Document AI Warehouse overview. That link still is up.

Speaker 1:

Some of the stuff that came out in the Google deposition is already. I know it's public information. They moved it. It's not at the leaks I had before. So some of the stuff you have to get it now, um, because it might be gone.

Speaker 1:

You can rewrite history on the internet. Uh, if people are not maintaining what's going on, um, and you can change it, okay, so, uh, that's why, uh, sites like the way back machine are super important when you can change it. Okay, so that's why sites like the Wayback Machine are super important when you can go see some of this stuff and they kind of catalog and document history, because if, well, we could just keep changing the internet, we don't know what our history is, right, anyways, that's a side topic, but the thing I would tell you is, this search engine journal article really doesn't go into anything about the article, it just talks about the clarification. I tell you, based on what I'm seeing, mike King, too, is also finding from Rand Fishkin that he believes that this is legit and he's really put out some good information surrounding it with some, I guess, key takeaways. Some of the other things I have pulled up is a search well se roundtablecom article. It's talking about CTR, dwell time and other UX signals that are quote unquote, made up myths, ux signals that are quote-unquote made up myths. So google has come out multiple times and said and this by, uh uh, barry schwartz. And multiple times google has come out and said, well, time is not a ranking factor and a lot of what they say becomes semantics, right? So they're saying that in itself is not a factor, but some of the other signals that it's sending and what that dwell time means plays into other things, right? So it actually does have an effect. Everybody knew it had an effect. Gary Isles, who we had on our podcast. He came out and said nope quote unquote generally made up crap. Uh, much more simple than people think. Well, I think dwell time is pretty easy.

Speaker 1:

You go to a website, you hang out there, gary, I love them. We've had them on our podcast in the past. Uh, but yeah, you've got to be really specific. Like legalese on, you state this thing. Does that mean this? Right? And they're just very, very narrow focused. They're not wanting to kind of give away the coke formula, right, um, but they want to provide you direction. So, again, that article, a pretty short article, is just basically saying hey, y'all over at google were saying this is not the case. However, it it's coming out that it is the case, right, and there are a lot of these signals that are sent, and we knew this. Google set up Chrome so they could see what you're doing on all these other websites. Google's looking at how you're behaving, how you're spending time on these websites, and, of course, that needs to be incorporated into. Okay, if we have somebody that has a similar profile like this, should not we show similar content that this person liked and spent time on and engaged with? Yeah, of course we do right. So, um, well, time is important and we'll go into that a little bit further. Uh, I also uh was.

Speaker 1:

I've been reading on this for like a couple of weeks now, so I had pulled up a Wikipedia page on evaluation measurements and so information retrieval. So a lot of what they talk about is this information retrieval document, this document, ai warehouse. It's a lot about kind of how it's being labeled against schema markup, that sort of thing, and how they prioritize this data. Right, because Google's got to organize everything, all information in the entire world on the web. How does it do that? This gives some really really key insights into that, and we'll put these articles again in the show notes so you can go find out for yourself. However, there was additional documents that came out and a lot of really interesting stuff that well was shown. I have my notes over here.

Speaker 1:

You know this is really talking about, well, fighting automated spam. So if you're running ads and you're not getting any leads, I bet you. There are some spam bots out there that are just clicking on your links. There's a lot of negative SEO starting to go on. I guess it's just getting super competitive. We've had two clients that have been attacked with this link spam and basically you got to do something about it because if someone keeps doing it month over month to you and you don't disavow that, google's going to assume that you're doing that or you want that, and Google assumes and the engineers assume that you are maintaining your website.

Speaker 1:

So your digital representative, someone that's managing your website it could be just general plugin management or just maintenance of your site, but there's a lot of kind of 360 things that you should look at from a reputation management. You want to hear what people are talking about you. You can set up Google alerts. It's free, but you should be understanding what's going on in search console. You should be understanding what's going on with search console. You should be understanding what's going on with your site and you shouldn't put that completely in the hands of somebody that's your digital representative unless you really have had a conversation with them. They understand what you're doing, you know that they care about your work and also they know what they're doing and they actually do it and follow through. It can't be a black box.

Speaker 1:

So you know, a lot of stuff came out about finding manual and automated spam. Really, with websites, I would recommend always turning the comments off. I think just everybody's using comments for spam and for SEO purposes and it's just not very helpful. I like to clean it up. I think you can put a lot of that stuff behind a paid wall or in a Facebook group or something like that. They talked about minor factors such as penalties for exact match domains. Now, I have seen exact match domains work, but they are kind of spammy and you do get hit a little bit on it.

Speaker 1:

But if you're building good content at a certain kind of standard deviation of where you fall, it actually does help you. I still think it helps you. I see a lot of sites that are ranking for that, but certainly a lot of sites maybe they were in first, they got knocked down to seventh and say, hey, can you hang? Are you really producing good content? And so they're just kind of comparing that versus some of this other stuff you know they go into like redundant anchor texts and unbranded searches, stuff like that.

Speaker 1:

Let me see what else in here there's. There's actually, you know, a couple really key takeaways. Um, they're looking at content right In a 12 hour time span and what you actually did. So they're looking at the last 20 changes that you made to your website. That's something that I knew that they were looking at the content and I knew caffeine could move stuff pretty quickly. How they were pulling that data. I haven't read through all the IP stuff but yeah, it makes sense. You make a change to your website.

Speaker 1:

Google can see that update. It's pulling in that data to help make decisions and layer it against other things that it knows about you with scoring functions, et cetera. So you know, if you're doing a repetitive task, I call it like a robot human, Like it's stuff that's super repetitive that you're doing before you sign off, you might want to change it up to send some different signals because you don't want it to look that way to the algorithm, right? So you are talking to humans, but you're also talking to the Google algorithm. Let's see, yeah, there's so much stuff in here to organize it. It's talking about like I don't know if a lot of you know this, but universal search is actually like YouTube maps all wrapped together, and then you got an ads platform pushed in there, and then they even got like Google News where it pulls in stuff here, and then they got Google Images which they're combining. I mean, this gets pretty complex. There's all these different directories and again, google is not really live. They scrape the whole internet every two and a half months and then they process all the data and then they publish that and that's where the big topical authority moves come in.

Speaker 1:

Man, there's some really cool graphs here on associations, but it is too much to go into explaining through kind of an audio format. Where is the article? There's another website that had just. It was. I liked it. I've never heard of these guys before blind five-year-oldcom, um, but it was a super entertaining site and they went into the click-through rate signals. That kind of people are trying to game and it. It's interesting. Like if you look up a swarm theory, uh, basically some of these things start to work and then they really don't work and it works negative against you. So it works in the short term, but in the longterm you get crushed.

Speaker 1:

So, if you're looking for a quick spike, because it's replicating a event scenario or a new scenario where a lot more people are looking at your stuff than typically is normal, versus everything that's going on in your website and all the other ranking factors that are happening, right, and so, um, also, one of the things that Google's looking at now, too, is you know if you have there's a click farm or something like that going on, um, they're looking at, um, the history of what that user did, right, so you got. Typically, people are logged in on Google all the time, whatever. They're looking at your history. They're looking at your bookmarks, they're looking at the activities that you did I don't know if it's the last 20, like it is on the website, but they're looking at that. And if they're doing these repetitive tasks, whatever sites they're clicking on, it's actually actually gonna devalue those sites in some way.

Speaker 1:

So you're trying to do it. I think it hurts you. And then there's negative SEO people that are doing that to other sites and again, you don't know if it's helping or hurting you, um, but you don't want to do anything. That's unnatural. That's what I'll tell you, and there's all these things out there that you can do, but I can tell you, over the last eight years I have tried everything not with agency sites or clients or stuff like that. I did a lot of freelancing. I have my own stuff that's out there from an affiliate standpoint and I'll just tell you.

Speaker 1:

It's really good to understand how the Google algorithm works. If you haven't been banned, I've been banned on social media my Twitter account. You're not pushing the limit on learning the algorithm. I need to come out with more case studies, but it's really good to understand what's going on and then see in the analytics what's going on with client sites and be able to find that story and tell that story, because that's really what it's about. The data tells the story and that's why digital marketing is so much more powerful than traditional strategies. You can also optimize and you can also pivot very quickly because you're getting real time data. You can also pivot very quickly because you're getting real-time data.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, this blind5yearoldcom just really talked about like pogo sticking, for example, and long clicks. So pogo sticking is when you go to a website and then you click back to the search engines really quick because, well, it wasn't what you were looking for or you accidentally clicked on that, that click gets downgraded right. And also long clicks are. You click on something and then they stick around on the page for a long time. That click data, those click signals, tell Google okay, this site is engaging somebody. This site is interesting. People bookmark this site. This site is interesting. People bookmark this site.

Speaker 1:

All the tricks that people used to do are trying to represent real human behavior. And if you can speak to that real human behavior and what is it called Authentically, I guess, represent yourself and put something out of value, the algorithms will get that in front of the right people pretty quickly. I'm seeing this a lot on social media. If a lot of you are on TikTok, I can tell you TikTok doesn't show it to your friends. It shows the content to who wants to see it, so it spreads like wildfire. And if you're creating unique content that's very niche based, you're going to find your audience quickly. And then it's about how you engage with them and how you move them through the sales process.

Speaker 1:

Um, where, man, I had this article pulled up and it had something like the nine things that that you need to uh learn from. Oh, sandboxing, right. So they've said we don't use anything from Quorum for ranking. Well, that is not true. I always assume that. And then sandboxing they always said they didn't sandbox or there wasn't an audition period, and explain to clients, like, no matter what I do, you're in a penalty box for X period of time, or you're launching a new website, no matter what we do, google is not going to rank us. Yet they want us to keep sending these signals over time. And then when we come out of the gate, we're going to be coming out of the gate strong, but until we come out of the gate it's just like a pressure that's building up in a bottle and then boom, it pops off and you can move the needle, but they artificially keep you in that sandbox and it is so frustrating.

Speaker 1:

And when you're talking to clients and you're like, hey, you got to invest four to six months in this thing before we're going to see anything because you got to get to the top of the search results, I mean it's very difficult and that's why a lot of people just kind of circumvent it, go to ads because it's easy. But easy is crowded right now. You want to do the hard things, you want to. You want to do the investment long-term things because it's getting more and more competitive and again, if you're at the top of the pile, you get the lion's share of all the traffic and all the leads and all the business, and so you really want to own your market. Yeah, I mean, just everybody is so in the industry taken back by trust, right? Because there is just so many things that were blatant that Google said we are not doing this, that the documents articulate they did, and it goes in the detail of how to process the data that comes in and the IP and it gets pretty techie as far as how it all works.

Speaker 1:

I like reading about how the core algorithm works and thinking about how that's going to influence other things and what that means. I'll give you like a pro tip here. Basically, when you're building anchor text, link what's going on in that sentence, that paragraph also where it falls with other anchor text laid out in that, because those are kind of references and footnotes makes a difference and a lot of people think it's just the anchor text and it's really not. It's incorporated in other things and this can be articulated when you start looking through the IP and you understand how it works, what that means. So that gives you intentionality when you're doing on-page SEO. You know they talk about some of the older algorithms and kind of how they're supposed to work and what they said and site quality score. They talk about eat, of course, expertise, authority, trust mapping. You know Some stuff that has product reviews, certain restricted industries, which I'm not going to go into those links, but it's commonly associated with SEO, so I'll let you guess yeah, parsing a lot of well, machine learning items and a lot of people forget that. Well, machine learning items and a lot of people forget that.

Speaker 1:

Ai we're in the age of AI now. I wrote an article actually on the personalization component and right now we're in the attention era, right? So all your attention, all your data. I think AI is going to transform it, where it's going to be super personalized, it's going to actually be super intimate because you're going to be communicating with people and communicating back and get what you're looking for. I think AI is going to disrupt so many industries, like education, I think, in counseling. I mean.

Speaker 1:

Think about it. You like, put your data into the prompt. It measures against thousands and thousands and thousands of other response and it can give you the answer that has worked the best for that data set. I mean, this is really really powerful stuff of what you can do with these large language models and information Okay, how the homepage is ranked, like you know, seed keywords, homepage trust, how important that is. I mean, these are all things that we absolutely know and it's just kind of confirming some of those things and a lot of those things I've said hey, google says this, but I've seen this, google said this and I've seen this.

Speaker 1:

Now I'm getting proven right and it's really not any different than what was happening before. It's just when I was, I would have to tell people. Or if people would go do the research, I'd be like well, yeah, but when I do SEO on XYZ, this happens and I can replicate a similar kind of reaction on multiple sites. That's one of the advantages of working at an agency and also working in different industries. I see so much data of what the different teams are working on and I get to look at kind of how everything's impacting it and we can start implementing new strategies and we can see the responses it's getting, and so really a lot of the data we have is just in the field data, right, and then we can replicate it. So then it becomes more like a science, and so data really drives what you're doing, and, yeah, so I'll put these links in the show notes. You check it out.

Speaker 1:

I'll go into more detail on the next podcast. If you want to geek out, there'll probably be a short one so you can skip it if you're not into that sort of thing. I do have some interview podcasts that I might kind of put in. I am going on vacation for a couple of weeks, so I'm going to drip these to you, so you'll get these, and I will be on a cruise ship, maybe going to. Well, where where are we going? We're going to Bermuda, so we're going out of Boston, going to see some friends in Boston from YEC and um, and then we're going to go on a cruise and that'll be pretty fun.

Speaker 1:

Uh, a lot of this has to do with childcare. Okay, and on cruise ships they watch your kids, uh, for for extended period of time, and the kids get to play with other kids and the adults get to do adulting, which is fantastic, and the summer is typically difficult, and so we have really young kids and childcare is awesome. Um, yeah, so all you struggling out there, uh, entrepreneurs, marketers hopefully this was helpful. We got a ton of content. We got a ton of stuff on our website. I have some books out there to help you solve for well build your brand mania If you want to see how other people do it.

Speaker 1:

Rise of the personal brand no like trusts about podcasts. If you want to get into podcasting, that is like a quick, like starter guide on how to do that. And then, of course, for all of you that love SEO and it's changed so much in the last 36 months, I thought it would be good to publish kind of all the new strategies and what's going on. It's more of an overview. It's not every tactic and thing we're using. It's not like a workbook. We're going to start including that in our coaching program. But if you want to get a good idea of what's going on with SEO and the different areas to focus on, it really sets the table for you. So go check that out Again. If you got any value from this podcast, please just give us a comment, give us a thumbs up emoji like it. Subscribe if you want to get. This really helps out with algorithm. So thank you so much for listening to me ramble here and until the next time. Bye, bye for now.

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