Exploit Reveals How and Why Google Ranks Content

Let's talk about this Google exploit that was discovered that revealed 2,000+ classifiers for click probability, site quality, consensus, and more.

So the exploit reveals how Google, how and why Google ranks a website. There's query classifications. Google classified nearly all queries into 8 refined query semantic classes. Short fact, bool, short for Boolean, yes or no questions, other, instruction, definition, reason, comparison, and consequence. Like consequences like your money, your life, right? Or YMYL, which is the same thing. And then they give different scores for things like brand visibility, user interactions, anchor text relevance around the web, click probability. And this was the interesting one. And this is what I want to talk about. It says Google doesn't use click-through rate directly in ranking. However, it appeared Google used click probability for every organic result. I actually disagree with that one right there because we've seen studies posted in the past. I don't know if you recall Rand Fishkin doing the one on best steak. I believe it was the keyword best steak. Had everyone go Google, click on the second result instead of the first result, or click on the first result, click the back button really quickly, and then go to the second result, and then, or third result was one of them, and then hover around. That result just shot up for, it was, I think the keyword was best steak or something like that.

He addressed that in the video. I just forgot what he said, but I just remember he addressed it.

But, you know, and we're seeing click-through rate data really affect rankings. I get pitched, no joke, all the time from people like, look at this, This bot that I created. There was a company out of the UK that showed me this, and I've known about this for years, but that showed me this and they're like, look at the software we built and look at all these people we got all around the world. And they had a database of like tens of thousands of people, no joke, with Gmails, real users. And they were paying them to do Google searches, click, and then go to a specific result. And it was impacting rankings, like 110% sure. I was seeing the data. They were doing tests with random URLs and showing me the like, Pick a random URL, picked one, not mine, not a client. And they're like, look what we did. And it was working. And I was like, they're like, do you want this technology for your clients? I'm like, no. They're like, why not? I'm like, this is a short-term hack. This is not long-term thinking.

This over here is interesting to me. So on measurement, so there's a site quality score. Most sites fall between 0.6 and 0.7. So the higher the better, right? This is actually measured at the subdomain level, which I don't think is the main point of that, but I find that a little interesting. So this guy Mark went and he found the site quality score patent that Google filed. So this is measured using factors such as how often people search for your site, how often people select your site, how often people use your site in anchor text. So this is interesting with a name like Single Grain, for example, a lot of people search for single grain malt whiskey, right? They just search for single grain. So I think there is a little bit of benefit there. But the main thing here is if you're, if you're a brand, this one directly from a Google engineer, you mentioned this, if someone's searching single grain malt whiskey, apple, apple, No, no, no, not malt whiskey. A lot of people— I'm not even saying malt whiskey.

Or let me rephrase. If they keep searching Single Grain, they're looking for malt whiskey and they click on the malt whiskey result. Yeah, it hurts you negatively.

Yeah. But here's the thing. In Google Search Console, our click-through rate on Single Grain is like 60+%—

That's great.

They're clicking that, right?

But that means I don't think most people searching for Single Grain are actually looking for malt whiskey at that time.

Which is getting to my point. You got to be a brand, right?

Yeah.

And so if people are searching for Neil Patel or NP Digital, that's a brand. They're searching for Single Grain, it's a brand, right? If you become a brand, more people are using that in anchor text and people are more people are selecting your site, then you're good. That your site quality score, in my mind, seems like here you should go up and everyone should— if you want to, if you want to be a nerd, you can read this patent if you want. So yes. The number one challenge for businesses is hiring. And more specifically, the number one thing I get asked for all the time is, Eric, where can I go find an amazing marketer? And the reality is right now, when you think about the world, we have inflation. That also means wage inflation right now. And it means that when it comes to hiring talent, you can't spend as much as you would have in the last couple of years because it's just become too cost prohibitive. And so we've partnered with one of the best offshore recruiting firms when it comes to marketing. They've been a great asset for us, and I believe that they will be a great asset for you. All you have to do is go to marketingschool.io/hire. Again, it's marketingschool.io/hire to learn more. You can fill out the form there and we're going to place you with the best marketing hires that we can help you find. There's a lot of influencers on LinkedIn. There was a thread where people were just like, yeah, what we're seeing is links don't matter as much anymore, right? And I find that interesting because this guy's kind of proving the same thing too. It's like saying that if you have a brand, after the helpful content update, what happened? A lot of brands won out, right? The non-brands, the ones that really gamed SEO, it showed that they didn't do as well afterwards.

Yeah.

But yeah, anyway, that's it for today and we'll catch you tomorrow.