Google’s Leaked Documentation and What it Tells Us About Links

Here's some great insight into how to build links, from Google itself! 👇

May 29, 2024

Google’s leaked documentation is discussed everywhere now, and we will keep referring to it again and again for the foreseeable future.

Apart from what everyone already said about it (mainly, that Google has been blatantly lying to us for years and using the SEO community to spread those lies pretty effectively), there is A LOT to be said about how they evaluate links.

As you may know, I have a lot of experience in link building (from inventing the most popular way to build links earlier to creating linkable assets for clients now).

So I’ve decided to focus my coverage of this documentation on links and what it tells us about link building.

**** Watch us discussing this topic and ask more questions! ****

Note that this document doesn’t provide any insight into how Google scores those mentioned ranking factors. So it doesn’t provide any direct proof that links are the most important ranking factor. But the sheer amount of information on how they evaluate links speaks for itself.

Links are still huge.

Also note that the document appears to be very fresh, so, again, whatever they want us to believe, links remain the core part of Google’s algorithm.

Let’s just put these arguments to bed already.

Now, let’s move to a more practical part of my coverage: What this document teaches us in terms of link building.

Make sure to read Mike’s coverage of the documentation as I am quoting him a few times below:

Relevance is key

We knew this already but to those who have needed any kind of reassurance, there’s a specific demotion factor that discounts irrelevant links.

Google is looking for relevance on both sides of a link.

There’s also another demotion factor that has to do with irrelevant anchor text.

Freshness is key

We didn’t need this document to know this. I’ve just covered how freshness is important for link-building and rankings. But, again, this is a nice reassurance.

Google’s index is stratified into tiers where the most important, regularly updated, and accessed content is stored in flash memory. Less important content is stored on solid-state drives, and irregularly updated content is stored on standard hard drives.
you want your links to come from pages that are either fresh or are otherwise featured in the top tier. This partially explains why getting links from highly ranking pages and from news pages yields better ranking performance.

This is music to my ears because this is exactly what we do for our clients, i.e. creating linkable assets that generate links from media publications and journalists. Ask us how.

Links work on a SITE-level

The ever-going debate on how links are only a page-level factor can be put to rest now, finally. Google uses both site authority and home page power to calculate the link equity of each internal page.

So no, you don’t want to focus only on building links to your money pages. You can drive link equity to those by building your overall site authority (i.e. regularly publishing and promoting linkable content to keep fresh links flowing in).

Best links are those that get clicked

This is not directly addressed in the document but there’s some nice mention that Google does indeed use Chrome browser click data to assign page quality scores.

That said, if you previously believed that Google had no way of knowing if the link is ever clicked, you now know they do.

Another interesting nugget here is that Google takes what the link looks like into account. The more visible a link is (bold, underlined, colored) is better for link equity flow. I assume this has something to do with the clickability of a link (more visible links are more likely to be clicked).

Links that come earlier on a page are better

We have seen SEOs run experiments on this and there were lots of naysayers gaslighting those experiments. There were patents on this too. But this documentation also provides a nice context on this: Web documents are truncated. Google may give up on long documents and move on. If you want your links to count, they’d better come earlier on a page.

This is nothing we, as perfectly white-hat link builders, can control, of course. But this is nice to know.

This also means that when creating a page, put your most important content on top.

To conclude…

In essence, there’s nothing new to know about SEO or link building from that documentation. We’ve all known that for years. We correlate what we do with what we see in rankings.

What this leak does is finally giving us this moment: