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We recently came across an article by Rand Fishkin, a recognized and widely cited search marketing industry expert with 15 years of experience in the field, about Google documents leak.

While this documentation doesn’t fully explain how Google ranks sites in its search results, it does provide interesting details about the data that Google collects. Many of the findings in this documentation contradict some of Google’s public claims. For example, the information suggests that subdomains are not counted separately and that domain age is not collected or factored into rankings.

Like Rand, we believe that everyone involved in SEO has the right to study these documents, understand their implications, and draw their own conclusions. Many of our own partners, in fact, are travel bloggers with websites earning through the Travelpayouts brands.

At a time when Google is introducing frequent updates that critically affect the positions of travel blogs in the search results, as well as the volume of traffic and earnings from affiliate marketing, this information is extremely important and interesting. It is especially valuable for travel bloggers and affiliates who are looking to adjust their SEO and blogging strategies.

We won’t be rehashing the entirety of Rand’s article or anything along those lines, as you can read all the first-hand information on the SparkToro blog. Instead, we enlisted the support of our SEO expert, Anton Ivlichev. We have asked him to highlight the interesting data he noticed in the leaked documents and explain how this information can be utilized by travel bloggers.

Should You Trust the Leaked Google API Documents and This Article?

• To verify the authenticity of the Google API Content Warehouse documents, Rand consulted three ex-Googlers. One declined to comment, while the other two confirmed that the documents seemed legitimate based on their experience.
• Additionally, Rand received confirmation from Mike King, the founder of iPullRank, who affirmed that the documents seemed authentic and contained significant information about Google’s inner workings.
• The most recent date in the API documents is August 2023, suggesting that the documentation was up-to-date as of summer 2023 and possibly even as recent as March 2024. The documentation references deprecated features and includes notes indicating that some features should no longer be used, which implies that those without such notes were still active as of the March 2024 leak.
• Google’s leaked documentation does not definetely prove which elements are used in their ranking systems. Therefore, the conclusions drawn from this Travelpayouts article and Rand’s article cannot be considered definitive evidence that Google uses certain elements or gives them specific weight when ranking sites in its search results.

What Myths Does the Google Documents Leak Dispel? An Explanation by Anton Ivlichev, Travelpayouts’ SEO Expert

Anton Ivlichev, SEO expert at Travelpayouts

The leaked documentation describes 2,596 API modules containing 14,014 attributes (functions). These modules encompass various aspects, including YouTube, Google Assistant, Google Books, video search, links, web documents, data collection infrastructure, internal calendar systems, and People API.

There’s a sense that Google’s representatives may be intentionally misleading users and professionals about the ways in which their systems function. This suspicion arises because certain elements, previously claimed to hold no weight, are evidently taken into account by Google’s algorithm.

1. Domain Authority

Despite Google’s repeated assertions that they don’t rely on domain authority, there exists a function in their code known as “siteAuthority”.