The one time we roasted Google instead. The leak, decoded.
This episode
The Google Leak: What SEOs Should Know
Roasted by
Yaron · Ben
S124:43
In this episode
Google accidentally pushed 2,500 pages of internal API documentation to GitHub, and we walk through the 14,000 attributes SEOs were never supposed to see.
Rand Fishkin gets his vindication: Google denied using click data for years while the docs show short clicks, long clicks, and dwell time baked right in.
The leak suggests Chrome was built partly to hand Google the full clickstream of billions of internet users. Brilliant, and a little terrifying.
Whitelists are real: categories like travel, Covid, and politics have sites that rank because they are on the list, not because their pages are better.
The E-E-A-T plot twist: Google treats authors as entities, yet much of the E-E-A-T story may be fluffier than we were told.
The roast scorecard
The Google Leak: What SEOs Should Know
No grade issued on air
On the grill:Brand & trust signalsReadability & designDigital PR & mentions
Key findings
Google collects post-click behavior like dwell time, short clicks, and long clicks, signals it publicly denied using for years.
Category whitelists exist for areas like travel, Covid, and politics, which explains why giant sites rank on those SERPs no matter what they publish.
Google maintains a domain authority style metric despite years of saying no such thing exists.
The docs cover roughly 2,500 pages and 14,000 attributes of active code, but they reveal what Google measures, not how much weight each signal carries.
Brand appears to matter more than almost anything else in the documents, which is rough news for young sites without one.
Top action items
1Promote your content where your real audience lives, social, newsletters, and communities, because engaged visitors who stay on the page are a positive signal.
2Audit your blog design for engagement: keep the feature image from burying the text, fix contrast so links are visible, add a table of contents, and match search intent.
3Skip SERPs stacked with whitelisted giants unless the intent is worth the fight, and find creative ways to reach your audience instead.
4If your site is young and budget is tight, put money into PPC and digital PR while you build the brand SEO now clearly rewards.
What we learned (steal these)
The leak tells you what Google looks at, not how much it counts. Treat it as a testing roadmap, not a rulebook.
Engagement is a ranking input, so design pages people actually want to stay on, then get the right people to click them.
Brand and credibility come first. A strong blog feeds the brand, and the brand feeds the rankings.
Signed and grilled by
Yaron · Ben
SEO Bros · S1
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