Unveiling the Google Leak: What It Means for SEO Best Practices

In this episode A2O Digital analyzes the recent Google leaked document and reveals possible factors affecting Google Search rankings, such as PageRank variations, site authority metrics, and more. Check out this episode to hear Tim and Justin discuss the latest Google algorithm updates and their effects on home service businesses. They also break down the key points and takeaways from the leaked document and explore how these insights can influence your SEO strategy.

Transcript

Tim  00:00

Hi, I'm Tim Coleman, and I'm your host today. I'm also the managing partner of A2O Digital, a full service digital marketing agency working exclusively with home service businesses. My co-host today is Justin Bencsko, who's the director at our agency. Welcome, Justin.

Justin  00:31

Thank you, Tim. Glad to be here. I think we got a topic that has, at least if you're in the SEO world has been being talked about a lot. So excited to kind of, you know, talk about it and unpack some of the takeaways we have from this. 

Tim  00:47

Yeah, for sure. So we're talking about the Google leak. And this happened, I think, in March, it was in March, when it happened and it was something like 14,000 attributes of Google Search, Local, YouTube, basically all Google's properties. And the, it was really the ranking factors of these properties and how they relate to these properties. 

Justin  01:18

Yes, it was an internal document, right. And it kind of, you got a look under the hood of what Google's looking at when they're, you know, their algorithm of how they're designed to rank things. It kind of gives you an under the hood look. It didn't, didn't necessarily, like tell you the weight of different things, so it doesn't give you everything but it like, it was, it was very interesting. 

Tim  01:45

It was a comprehensive look at all the things they consider, but not how much they consider each thing is the way that we're sort of thinking about it. The other thing that I'm very curious about because this is how my mind works, is was this an accident? My first thing is conspiracy right away. I want to know this. And I know I'll never get that answer, and I will, but I will, I will wonder about it for the rest of my life.

Justin  02:09

It's an interesting thought. What would be their, what would be Google's motive to, for it not to be an accident? I guess? Like why would they? 

Tim  02:16

It was one, it was one engineer who did it as far as I know. 

Justin  02:20

Yeah. 

Tim  02:20

And why would you? I mean, it's a GitHub repository. I don't work in GitHub regularly, but like, I think as an engineer, I don't know. I don't know enough of this to speculate. But like, why are you making a private, the most private document in that company public?

Justin  02:36

I mean, it could be one disgruntled employee. 

Tim  02:38

Right? Sounds interesting, right?

Justin  02:40

You're saying maybe Google from the top said, let's leak this document? And because...

Tim  02:47

No, no, no Google, no way, no no. Disgruntled employee, like, oh, I didn't get my lunch today, they threw away my free lunch or whatever, you know, and like that. But that's pure speculation. What we do know is that Google has confirmed that it was a leak, Google did confirm that it is real. So we got confirmation from Google. 

Justin  03:10

Yeah.

Tim  03:10

We did not...everything else I just said was pure speculation and what I want to know. Like, you know, curious minds want to know.

Justin  03:17

So let's, let's talk about some of the like, interesting takeaways from it, from, you know, our perspective. And this is coming from like, you know, we work in home services, right, as a home service business, what were the most interesting things to us and takeaways. And it can be different, right? If you're in different industries, you know, there may be specific things that like more apply to industry. So we're looking at it from this perspective of home services. First thing one that I'll say, is they talked about Clickstream data and Chrome. So obviously, Google has the Chrome browser, right? And it sounds like one of their motives for like, creating this, is that they can measure what people are doing within that browser, right. So like, obviously, Google can measure, if someone's, you know, doing a Google search, they can measure that. But once they leave the Google search result and go to a page, they're not able to then measure anything that's going on in an individual website, right? That's right. Analytics was, there was no mention of them using Google Analytics... Which is interesting.

Tim  04:32

 ...which is interesting. But Chrome? Definitely. 

Justin  04:34

 Yes, yeah, so they're using Chrome to maybe get a better look right at what someone's doing once they go to that individual website, right?

Tim  04:46

Maybe, yeah, I think, I think they're definitely using that in a lot of ways. Yeah.

04:50

Yeah. So that was just interesting that like that, was, and it makes sense, right? Like the more information they have there, I don't know if that gets into a privacy...

Tim  05:00

Anyway, how much of us read those privacy terms? None of us read them and we just, "oh, the browser's faster. I'm going to use it," right? So we never considered it, but now we know they're using it. And, you know, when, when you see some of the things in that, and you hear SEOs talking about or breaking down this document, and you think about what happened, the antitrust trial, you could sort of even say, okay, they talked about Navboost in the, in that trial. And now we see just really how often it's mentioned in this document, and how big a ranking factor Navboost really is.

Justin  05:33

Yeah Tim, talk a little bit, just a reminder for everyone what Navboost kind of is, because we talked about this on an earlier episode, it's come up a couple of times and this is like a relatively new term. Talk about, just quick what that is and then we can get into, like some of the, how they're measuring clicks, and we can talk about details.

Tim  05:52

Yeah, Navboost is literally I think the clicks that are, that are associated with, I think what Google calls like a normalized query or something like that is kind of the way, what I got out of it, right? So, how many times is this document being clicked on for that query? And then they can slice it a bunch of different ways, particularly for, for us it's all importance by geo, right? You see, sometimes you're ranking in one town or not the other town as a local business, and you think how come? And it could be your brand is more powerful. There's, you know, more folks in one town have used you than the, than the other town or something like that. So they can slice up, they can slice it by geo. And like, you can just, it's we're getting the sense that the algorithm for organic is much closer to the algorithm for ads, which was always known relied on CTR. CTR was a huge part of rank score for ads. We always knew that. Google revealed that, we knew that, I mean, that's how it works.

Justin  05:52

So CTR, just to explain that right? In Google ads, click through rate, is something that is super important that we're, that we're measuring. And that's just saying, you know, if your ad showed up 100 times, what percentage is that getting clicked on? So if your CTR is five, five out of those 100 searches, someone clicked on it. Google's measuring that, to, Google's looking at that, to see that essentially, the searcher is voting and saying like, hey, this ad is answering what I was looking for. So they use that in their algorithm and kind of with Navboost and all this, in the document, they're measuring all different types of clicks. Again, like you said, it's working very similarly in that, like they're measuring, what are people clicking on? Right? Like they're using that data to determine and use that as votes, essentially, of what, what to what to rank? So... 

Tim  08:07

Now they're also taking it a step further from anything that I imagined ever taking place in Google Ads. And that is trying to assess further the quality of that, click right?

Justin  08:16

Yes. So I'll just start naming some of these.

Tim  08:20

Justin, you're gonna do the new, the new, the SEO's new vocabulary words. Yeah, here we go, let's go.

Justin  08:25

So there's bad click, there's good click, there's last-longest click. There's one in here called the unicorn click?

Tim  08:34

The unicorn click, which is an especially good click, right? Yeah, unicorn click.

Justin  08:38

So it doesn't, it didn't necessarily in the document explain exactly what all those, we can infer what those mean, right? Essentially, though, they're trying to measure each of these clicks or not. Not all clicks are measured equal, right? Was that a good click? How do they determine, how would they determine a good versus a bad click? Let's just like speculate and talk about that. If you are Google, how would we, how would we measure that?

Tim  09:00

I would try to assess if a person was there for for one second. Did they, did they leave because they got their answer answered and it was such a good result? Or did they leave because the site was horrible? And then they, then they, and I think the way Google could do that is right, like, okay, let's say I typed in "weather" and I went to a site real quick. Two seconds, I saw the temperature, that's all I want and I was done. And I didn't type in, I didn't refine my query...

Justin  09:28

 You didn't do anything else. 

Tim  09:29

...I didn't click anything else.

Justin  09:31

You didn't go anywhere else, right? So if you went, yeah, that's, that's a good point, right? If you click, let's say, you click a link, you go into a site. You could get what you want and be done and not do anything else. And let's just say you hit back and then you stopped, and that was, you're on the page for five seconds. That actually could be a good click, right? If you did that, you got to the page, you hit back and then you started clicking on more sites and started looking at that and stayed on another site for a while. That would be an indicator that first click wasn't a good click, even though it was the same, you did the same thing. So yeah, they must be using the context of everything that you did in that session on Google. Right? Did you search something else different?

Tim  10:13

Did you refine the query? Did you pogo stick? Yeah, like all those things you've got to imagine. And then we could see, we learn for the first time that there's there's a waiting system for these between zero and one, right? So they don't do anything in absolutes. I'm not saying oh, we're sure of that, we're sure of this. We say oh, the probability is a little bit higher than this was a good click, the probability is a little bit lower that this was a good click. There might even be a bad click right? 

Justin  10:37

Yeah. Last-longest click was another one on here. That's probably the indicator, right? The longest click, they went somewhere, stayed there for a long time and that was the last thing they did. That's probably, if you get a lot, I'm imagining that's a good thing for you if you get a lot of last-longest clicks on your site. There's no way to know all this for sure but I would imagine that. Yeah, all super interesting. There's also squashed versus unsquashed clicks.

Tim  11:06

Yeah, I was trying to understand those. And to me, squash was like Google was squashing them, like Google was like, wanted to count them less because they, they were, couldn't determine the quality or something like that. 

Justin  11:18

So my understanding with those from what I've read, and I don't think I have a perfect understanding, this is the way that they're making sure that their algorithms cannot be manipulated, right? Like, they've never, they have always denied that they use, you know, clicks and all this information. 

Tim  11:39

Right, right and that's an important thing.

Justin  11:41

And I get why they probably have done that, like if, you know, there's spammers are always going to figure out the next thing, right? If these are important, they're going to figure out a scheme to go and, you know, okay, I'm going to get a VPN and come from all over the country and put clicks on our site and, you know, do, do all these things. So I think the squashed and unsquashed is one of the ways that Google is preventing something like that from manipulating their rankings, right? I think they talked a little bit about how not one signal can't like, totally dominate that algorithm and where they rank things. So it's the way that they do that, I don't know exactly. 

Tim  12:22

I think that's right, though. I think that's right. Squashed and unsquashed, it's like how Google regards it, whether they're literally going to use the collected squash and, or if they think that this is a click that should count, it's unsquashed. Now, I'm not positive of that. We're all learning some new vocabulary words in this and how Google refers to some of those things. But we definitely got some new vocabulary words, particularly around click. And I think, I think the big thing for small business owners to take away from Navboost is that brand matters. Like, when you think about what's the takeaway, we just talked about all this vocabulary. There's no action item for squashed and unsquashed in all our vocabulary we just learned. But there is an action item that says, hey, brand matters. And Matt Cutts, who is a former Google engineer, he's in charge of spam, and he was the PR guy for years who talked to SEOs. As early as 2005. I saw him making videos about Google trying to figure out that puzzle between authority and popularity, right? Because popularity is probably going to tell you a lot more about a plumber than links. There's just not a lot of reason for small businesses to link to one another's backlinks, it's not a great measure of, of how good a plumber you are. But how many folks go to the search box, type in your brand and click on your website probably is a really good measure of how good of a plumber you are, particularly when you can start slicing up by geo, right? And we know they're doing that, that's now fully confirmed. So...

Justin  13:51

How far do you think they go with the geo? I think they can go down to like, even, you know, certain communities, right, like you've, when you look at search results...

Tim  14:01

It mentioned, it mentioned country, it mentioned state, I think. But, what to your point, it went beyond just the town. Like it was like, I forgot how, it wasn't quite neighborhood. But it was a synonym for that. I don't remember exactly what it said. But it was like, like they really slice geo.

Justin  14:19

But they can measure and even like a local town, right, the difference and rank things differently versus you know, a county or metro area, right? Like they're looking at it at that level and giving different results at that level, which is important for a local home service business, right? Like you may, if you're smaller, you may only service you know, depending on what vertical you're in, right? Like a small town or a small few towns, right? So you can still kind of do this and have that popularity in a small area and still kind of, be effective at this. It's not like oh, you know, I'm not the big guy. There's no way for me to, you know, compete. You can do this in a smaller, in a smaller level and and have an effect, so.

Tim  15:04

From our perspective Justin, we absolutely see that with our customers. We know that the customers who spend the most, in the most effective media, right, if spending, advertising in media that's not effective. So, so in our industry spending in Google Ads will get you a lot of clicks, it will get you a lot of new customers. And when somebody becomes your customer, they stop typing in category searches and start typing and brand searches. So they spend a lot on Google. 

Justin  15:30

Hopefully, hopefully. 

Tim  15:31

If you do a good job.

Justin  15:32

Yeah. Well, if you do a good job, right, like if they, you know, if you went and did something for them a few years ago, right, do they, do you remember the plumber that came to your house three years ago? Maybe? 

Tim  15:44

Not three years ago. 

Justin  15:45

I think that's part of too...

Tim  15:46

Yesterday. He was there last week. So I might, I might be able to come up with his name but not three years ago. 

Justin  15:50

But, but just to think about this is, this is, I don't want to like derail, but, you know, staying in communication and making sure that they remember, remember you, you know, like that's, that can play a part in that, too, so.

Tim  16:04

Post sale, yeah. So those types of things, and I know that people get mad when I say advertising in Google Ads. I do not think advertising in Google ads will help you rank in Google. I think if the industry that you are in, Google Ads is an effective form of advertising, then an effective form of advertising, which in this case happens to be Google Ads, would help you rank in Google. But our guys who do TV, our guys who do radio, our guys who are, who are just doing wherever they can get, feel like they can accomplish a level of branding that they desire or get a ROAS. They're going to spend that money, they tend to rank much, much better than our customer who says, you guys, you guys are it. You're all I'm doing. And you know, we need...that's great. But like, you're, it's not going to be as effective.

Justin  16:57

Yeah, we just had Ryan Chute from the Wizard of Ads on the podcast to talk to all about like, branding, and all those types of things. And this is another area where like we said, branding helps you. You do those types of things, there's more people searching for your brand. Or, if they do that category search, and there's that aid and recall, right, where they say, oh yeah, Precision, or whatever your brand is, XYZ, you know, plumbing. I remember them from that commercial. And they click on you, right? Like those are, Google's measuring those things and that helps you with SEO too. 

Tim  17:29

Simple, simple. The more people in any given community who search for you, and click on you, but let's just assume it's legitimate and it's not being manipulated. I don't want to talk about how to manipulate it, I don't know how to manipulate it, but if those things happen naturally, you're going to rank better.

Justin  17:47

Yes, if they're searching...

Tim  17:49

 Relative to your competition.

Justin  17:49

...if they're searching for your brand, or also if they're doing a category search, and then they click on you because then they like, recall your brand. So in both ways, that's, Google's definitely measuring that, it's super important. Yeah, what what other any other things from the document? You know, I kind of had on my notes, about PageRank. They talked about domain level PageRank. So that's basically like the main page on your site, the homepage, your domain as a whole. That, like how they decide to like, rank that and the power of that will affect the rankings of every other page on your site, which is interesting.

Tim  18:29

So huge surprise there because the original PageRank formula was just what it said. It was not called "homepage" rank, it was called PageRank, right? So I can remember prominent SEOs literally saying, because newbies would come in and they would say, what's the PageRank of my website? And that technically wasn't correct. It was each page on your website. I had a blog, I was writing a blog in the, in the, I don't even know what you call the aughts, right, it was like 2006-2007. And that was when the pixie dust, that's what people call like, the PR bar, in the browser was still there. So I go on every page on my blog and see the PageRank of it. So in my brain, I associated PageRank with page. Now it turns out what?

Justin  19:18

Turns out that they're actually looking at like, the top level domain when they're ranking all the other pages, right?

Tim  19:26

It's an attribute of every page on your website. Now the whole page PageRank, complete surprise to anybody who's kind of studied this over, over the years. So that was really interesting.

Justin  19:39

They also talked about different penalties that, that you can potentially have. One that was interesting to me is the exact match domain. You can get a penalty for that. So that's basically, if your domain URL is an exact match to whatever that search is. So like, an example, if you're a plumber in Cincinnatti right, if your URL is Cincinnatiplumber.com. Right? Actually back in the day, that used to be a strategy to be able to rank really well. Now, Google is actually saying that that, you know, can be something that is a penalty. And we've seen Google, they're so much better at, you know, deciphering that and that not being like, a huge factor. 

Tim  20:22

So I definitely would not worry about Cincinnatiplumber.com. But, if...

Justin  20:23

If you already, I wouldn't, I think there's two distinguishing factors. If you already have that domain now, I wouldn't worry about changing it, right? Because there's so many factors with domain and trying to switch it or whatever. But if I was starting from scratch a business, I wouldn't pick that domain. I would pick something associated with the brand.

Tim  20:47

I would pick my brand, I agree with that, too. But I just don't want to panic Cincinnati plumbers and the like out there. We have many that are town-geo, and they're...

Justin  20:58

And they're fine. 

Tim  20:59

 Yeah, and category-town domains that are very old and they rank just fine. This, this I think about, like, imagine I came up with a domain that I just wanted to rank for. I did like, modern hyphen, black hyphen, garage hyphen, doors.com. Now I'm going for one particular, really narrow search term. It's not even, okay, that's I think the type of domain that like, kind of ranked in the past and produced a kind of like a result that wouldn't have been good for the searcher, and Google wants to get rid of those and rightfully so, in my mind. Cincinnatiplumber, I would worry a lot less than, we, we don't even remember that happening anymore because Google got rid of them, I don't know I know, it's like I feel like it was like 10 years ago now or something like that, that they got rid of those types of things. So Cincinattiplumber is an example, but I wouldn't, if I'm Cincinnatiplumber, I'm not, I'm not worried about that.

Justin  21:46

You gotta look at everything. You got to look at everything and, you know, totality too. There's multiple reasons to make a decision on a domain and all that so. Okay, anything else? Like specific call outs? I think we can like, let's like, kind of like, try and okay, main takeaways from all this? Is there anything else before we do that that you wanted to touch on?

Tim  22:07

I think there was, I think there were two very interesting things. I watched a podcast that had Rand and Mike King in it and I think there were two super, super interesting things. First on links. So, that it, they, Rand and Mike King talked about something that was very surprising to me in that, too,

Justin  22:29

So Rand is Rand Fishkin. Rand Fishkin has been in the SEO world for a long, for a long time. 

Tim  22:34

He's no longer in the SEO world, but he's the founder of SEO Moz, back in the day, and he was very prominent in SEO from 2000 to 2015, or something like that when he left Moz, something like that. Don't quote me on the years, but um, and Rand Fishkin would have been a person like, that I followed very closely when I came into the industry to learn how to do, like it was Rand Fishkin, and Aaron Wall, and Danny Sullivan. And these are the guys that I followed to learn way back in the day. And they talked about, when we think about, when we thought about links, when we think about backlinking we think about nofollow, follow. We think about the PageRank of the site from which we're getting the link. And I've heard John Mueller, another PR guy from Google talk about what I'm about to say but like, we got, I think, confirmation here, in that the amount of organic traffic that the page that that link is on, and how often that link gets clicked, is going to matter. And that data is coming from Chrome. So Google can really assess the quality of the link now using Chrome. That's super interesting. And here's the real kicker. If it is a nofollow link, but it's on a page that gets a lot of organic traffic, Google will count it. Super, super interesting. And like, the example they gave is, let's say you got a nofollow link and the editorial policy of of like Forbes, for instance, is that they have to nofollow the links. So, and that's just an example, I don't know if Forbes has that editorial policy. And it ranks number one for a popular query, people flood to that page and start clicking that link. Google's counting that link. Conversely, you get, you get a... A follow link, and it doesn't do anything, Google doesn't care. From a site with the kind of authority, nobody ever goes to or sees it. It's like if a tree falls in a forest. So now they know that from Chrome, that's a huge revelation from all of us. I mean, that's actionable for anybody who does link building, hires link, backlink or whatever. That one's huge. 

Justin  24:39

Yeah, if you're not like in the SEO world, and following this, that doesn't really mean anything to you. But if you are, you may have hit one point. So that's a nofollow link, that doesn't, I'm not going to worry about that or I'm not going to spend the time to go do that. And that's, that's kind of, this is saying that's not the case. It's still, it could still go that Google is still looking at that, considering it. They can see this in the Chrome browser and it's probably worth getting anyway. 

Tim  25:03

The other thing is I think that affects small business owners, and this will happen to a lot of small business owners from time to time, if you want to add a service to to your site, they, they talked about topicality.

Justin  25:17

So let's go, let's go with an example for this. Let's say you're in the HVAC industry. That's...

Tim  25:24

That's actually, yeah and you added plumbing.

Justin  25:26

...and you want to get you want to get into plumbing right?  You're doing HVAC, your website....

Tim  25:30

That's actually the example, because of Joy's podcast. It was Joy's podcast, which, anybody who's interested in this Google leak, Joy Hawkins has a podcast with Rand and Mike King. It's super interesting.

Justin  25:38

Cool, yeah we can link to that, there's some way, I think there's some way we can link to that in the notes.

Tim  25:42

Sure, yeah, yeah, it was super interesting.

Justin  25:42

Yeah, so okay, so say you're an HVAC company and you've been doing that for forever. And you're saying I want to, you know, move into plumbing and your website is all about HVAC. And now you want to rank for plumbing, right? That's kind of the scenario you're talking about. 

Tim  25:56

Yeah, what they talked about is they have this complicated database. It's called a vector database. And to me, to explain, a database is just rows and columns so it's an Excel spreadsheet. Now, if you gave it depth, you'd have a vector database, like super complicated, right? That's what Google is using to measure topicality. So if you're an HVAC guy...I'm gonna use a little more extreme example, because I think plumbers with HVAC, it's much more common. But, we had a customer who was basically the largest pest control company in New Jersey, like Viking Pest Control. And, for whatever reason, I don't even know why this is. In addition to doing pest control, they sold gutter guards, those things that would keep the leaves from getting in your gutter. And...

Justin  26:44

So it's totally different, like, random service not related to pest control.

Tim  26:48

This was, I don't care what measure you use for Viking popularity, authority, PageRank, whatever. They ranked number one,in many, many towns in New Jersey, like they were a powerful website. They were around for a long time, they were the biggest. But, if you wanted to, you wanted to search for gutter guards, Viking was not...you go through 100 pages and you're not gonna find Viking for that because topicality. Topically...

Justin  27:13

Google saying this site is all about pest control, not ranking them for gutters. This has nothing to do with that.

Tim  27:18

Right! Think what that would do to even Google's credibility, right? I searched for gutter guard, I got a pest control site. So what they talked about, Mike and Rand on Joy's podcast, was you can't just do one page. If they really want to start ranking for gutter guards, they would have had to really expand their content in, in that field to be, to be, to expand that topic.

Justin  27:50

So that they kind of have an authority in that.

Tim  27:52

And then you start throwing by, is that a good idea? 

Justin  27:55

Yeah, so my question was, that I was going to ask, will I take away? 

Tim  27:59

Because now he's diluting? Yeah, the answer is probably right? 

Justin  27:59

Yeah, right, are you diluting?

Tim  28:01

So, if you're writing blogs and blog posts, keep them related to your content. Don't start creating complications. Google is not great with inconsistencies, that, that's what we've seen. I read somewhere else that came out of this leak: if you got from a site, a follow link and a nofollow link, Google does not know how to deal with it so it just follows it, right? Google doesn't do well with inconsistency. I would actually encourage you NOT to have the gutter guard page, or like maybe, like noindex the gutter. Like, I would say, topically focus as you're coming up. 

Justin  28:34

Yeah, I think you got to do a cost benefit analysis of like, okay, like, you know, is this important to, you know, try and rank this other service, whatever it is. What am I potentially losing by doing this? What are the, what are the potential risks from doing it and figure it out.

Tim  28:51

And if you're an SEO, whose customer comes to you and says, listen, I'm a pest guy, I want to do gutter guards, I need you to write this page for me. Let him know right away that that's probably not gonna happen. You could talk about topicality, you have the proof and you say, that just, but no SEO is gonna be able to do that for you. Google's ranking topics and that's not really gonna work. I think, I think that as a small business owner, you should think okay, so the traditional factors, they all still matter, right? Title tags, having good, relevant content, and backlinks. Yeah, so the first thing I think, you want to create a site that will resonate with your potential customers and they will want to choose you. So I think you want to learn and know what customers are looking for. And, you and I just had this sort of conversation before. I almost feel like putting a survey on my site to find out, like what customers are looking for. I can survey my existing customers, and I probably have on my site what they were looking for. But what about those first people who clicked on my site and didn't convert? Maybe I need to survey them. How do I do that?

Justin  30:06

Yeah, it's an interesting thought with this, right? Google is measuring this. They're saying every single person that visits your site is a vote, and they're using that to determine you know, how to show the search results, right? Put a survey on your survey on your site. If people come and aren't getting what they're looking for, see if you can get their, their input on what you didn't provide and provide that, right. Like, that's the whole thing. Like, you need to make sure that you're, when someone comes to your site, you're answering the questions that they're looking for, and they're getting what they need, right? Like, that's ultimately what all of Google's trying to measure. So that's, that's a really good idea, actually, right, you know, having that survey there and find out directly from people, what, where you're falling short, and figure out how to how to get that information to them.

Tim  30:53

We want to solve our customers' problems on our website, so that they call us, they do business with us, and Google sees that. I think, I think those are, that's a takeaway that we can learn. I think, you know, the, at a high level, you can think about it three ways. There's authority, there's popularity, and there's quality. So I think if, if you're newer, if you go to page one for your site, if you type in "lawn sprinklers", you know, "Timbuktu", and you're not coming up on the first page, go get backlinks. 

Justin  31:30

Google...so yeah, so if you can't get to the point where you're actually getting clicks, Google has nothing to measure. So you have to do all the traditional stuff, to like, kind of get you in the ring to actually kind of be able to have Google look at this and measure what people are doing. So that's like the, yeah, that's where you said from the authority standpoint. Like, you still have to do all the traditional stuff, it still matters. That kind of gets you in the ring to then, you know, talk about the other things.

Tim  31:55

Yeah and we're going through this. We created an online scheduler, it's called Street2Fleet. We created a website, a small website, we haven't done anything traditionally SEO. It is barely in the index, you type in the brand and Google thinks you spelled it wrong because I haven't done any of the traditional stuff yet that I need to do. So I need to start. It doesn't matter how quality, how high quality the site is, right now. I could have published the cure for cancer, and it would not matter, right? Like, I have got to do some of the traditional things in order to get that to where it can be, Google can start assessing, meaning getting clicks. So we got to get backlinks. We're not to the first page, we have to start. SEO starts with backlinks. Google might not even index it if you don't have any backlinks. Yeah, that's where you start.

Justin  32:41

So that's the kind of authority part the first part. Next, you said popularity?

Tim  32:46

Yeah, this is people typing your name in the search box to me, and then clicking, clicking on you when they type that in. Or as you kind of said, you do a category search, you're predisposed to that brand and you select them. That's, to me those are the two components of popularity. Do you have a brand that people recognize? Are you just hoping to be number one, and they just click on you because they reflexively click on the number one result? That's, that's not going to work anymore. You can't do that anymore. So yeah, yeah, authority, popularity, and then quality, which we kind of just talked about. Are you, for that particular query, when they click on your site, does it, does it answer the question? Do they choose you and then are done searching? Or, do they leave your site, go into the next site, spend 10 minutes there and then end up choosing that person, then they're done? Right? Who, if you were Google, who would you want to rank out of those, you know. And they're, they obviously have machine learning and AI that they're using to generate this information. So it's constantly happening, it's happening in real time. And those are, those are really the three things that I feel like are actionable right now, out of you know, this treasure trove that was the antitrust hearings last fall and then this leak. I mean, this combination has pulled back the curtain in a way that people studying SEO are just like, whoa, what a year, what a year, like, we never had this before. And we learned more, more than ever.

Justin  34:29

Yeah it's all, it's kind of, it's all the stuff that was speculated that Google always denied. And we're now getting a peek under the curtain and it's like yeah, they were. A lot of people are probably vindicated, they, they said Google's gotta be measuring this. Google kept saying no, kept saying no, and oh, actually, yeah, this is stuff that they were using. 

Tim  34:48

Yeah, I know, and Chrome and clicks, I know, for sure. It's really interesting. You will also get that thought process in your brain: can I just manipulate this? Can I I just have all my friends go click on my site? And I don't know the answer to that. It has never been our, we have never tried to rank by manipulating Google's index. I don't think that's the right approach. And what I will say is...

Justin  35:15

Never, listen, there's gonna be people that are going to try and figure it out, that are gonna try and do it. It's like every other thing, you know, like, may you short term, be able to figure it out? I think Google's very sophisticated at this point that for the most part, they they can figure that stuff out and not, and not let it, you know, manipulate the rankings. Could someone do something? Sure. But it's like anything else, right? Your, your time is, could that work for a little bit? Yeah, but eventually, Google is going to drop the hammer. Like with links, you know, back in the day, everyone was buying links, and you know, getting as many links as you can. And then Google said, nope, boom, hammer dropped, and all of a sudden people's traffic is, you know, totally decimated overnight. 

Tim  36:00

So manipulation to me is a very short term strategy. If you're, if you're by yourself, like some type of affiliate, and I picture the, you know, the kid with the, I always say the Dorito stained T-shirt, you're by yourself, and the Crush cans and Mountain Dew are all around you while you're on the keyboard. No problem. You've got employees who have families, like, manipulating Google's index is not a strategy for you, right? You want to be thinking obviously, much more long term. And interestingly, since the beginning of June, you know, those services like Algoroo? They, they measure the volatility of rankings and thus, you know, then you can infer that Google changed their algorithm. Since June, there has been almost no green days, like Google has, is responding to this leak with, with big, massive algorithm changes. So and, you know they're going after just that manipulation from what was revealed here. You know, what they said was this, the leak was real, and it was confirmed, but like, you know, don't look at it, like in that con-, you know, you can't really learn anything or whatever. But like, you could, right, and, and so now they're responding to, you know, they're responding algorithmically different than they responded in their PR statement is, is the way that I think about that a little bit.

Justin  37:15

Cool. All right. Anything else? Any other, you know, I think that was a, you know, we, we've talked for what, like a little over half hour, some good takeaways and thoughts. 

Tim  37:26

Hopefully ,hopefully, folks found that helpful for them running their home service business. Yeah.

Justin  37:31

All right. Awesome. Thank you, Tim, and...yeah. 

Tim  37:36

All right. So if you enjoyed today's episode, please like and subscribe to our podcast and have a great day everybody.

Justin  37:42

Like, subscribe, leave a review?

Tim  37:44

Sure. 

Justin  37:45

Alright, thanks.