The Google SEO leak has created an uproar in the marketing industry, with experts continuing to share their thoughts and analysis nearly two weeks since it was exposed to the public by Moz creator and SparkToro co-founder Rand Fishkin.
But what’s making waves right now is what the leak reveals about why new and small businesses find it extremely difficult to rank on Google Search, despite optimizing keywords, creating quality content, and implementing other SEO strategies.
According to technical SEO experts, what stands out from analyzing the nearly 2,600 leaked Google Search modules is its use of clicks as a ranking factor.
This not only makes it vulnerable to click manipulation but more significantly, alienates small businesses from ranking high on search engine results pages (SERPs).
How Google’s Algorithm Perpetuates ‘Elite Traffic Circle’
It’s already a general rule every marketer knows that Google gives a high score to websites with Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness (E-E-A-T).
But when the search algorithm combines this with clickthrough rates (CTR) as a ranking factor, it means big brands with high E-E-A-T scores have a huge advantage in ranking.
“The leak confirms what we’ve known — Google's algorithms perpetuate an elite traffic circle, sidelining smaller publishers,” SEO Stack IO Director Daniel Foley Carter said during a roundtable discussion about the latest leak.
AJ Kohn, a renowned SEO expert, believes that Google has to update its value judgments to keep up with the times and spread the ranking success more evenly with small publishers.
For instance, if Google updated its value judgments using NavBoost back in 2020 to combat the election misinformation that pervaded SERPs, it was to lean toward incentivizing branded content so that it would rank high.
According to Kohn, this would’ve occurred by Google boosting a brand’s content “if you outperformed your expected CTR by even 5%, we’re going to give you that boost” as opposed to previously setting 20% as a requirement.
But when the pandemic happened, brands shifted their marketing spend online. For big brands that have money to spend, they were able to create more effective digital marketing campaigns.
“Because I think Google was leaning into brands, they got a lot of success, which meant they poured even more money into it,” Kohn explained.
“So, I think you’re looking at sort of a combined effort of Google leaning one way with their click behavior, brands doing the same thing, and it became kind of a synergy that led to what I think is a pretty dismal search result right now,” he added.
CTR as a ranking factor combined with E-E-A-T scores then boosts big brands’ rankings on SERPs, maintaining their positions at the top spots and giving almost no room for small businesses to enter.
Because big brands rank high on search results, they inevitably get more clicks and backlinks because people can easily see them, perpetuating this vicious cycle where, as iPullRank Founder Mike King put it, “the winners keep winning, and the losers keep losing.”
However, not all SEO experts aren't aligned on this. For example, QGP founder and CEO Kosta Hristov argues that CTR doesn’t work alone.
"It works with other metrics like Time on Page, Number of Sessions, etc. If the CTR is low but the Time on Page is High, for example, it means that the content is useful to the user, but the search intent could be misaligned," Hristov explains for DesignRush.
What Can Small Businesses Do About Their SEO?
If Google isn’t giving small publishers a chance to rank on search results, so they can increase their visibility, authority, and trustworthiness, then what should they do?
King points out that many marketers have given up on SEO, prioritizing other strategies like social media and email marketing. Monitoring trends and user behavior is also a good way to go about it.
For instance, because users tend to just skim and not read every word, focus more on developing quality short-form content instead of wasting effort on thousands of words per article when no one will read them.
SEO experts who participated in the podcast were also in consensus that prioritizing user experience (UX) and the products gives small brands a better chance at ranking on search results, which means “approaching SEO a bit more like a marketer than a webmaster.”
“Why would you try to interpret a piece of content and its quality over behavioral indicators? What this should inspire the SEO community to do now is genuinely focus on your UX, focus on creating something,” Carter advised.
“Off the back of this link, we should be looking at information gain and UX at shaping people’s behavior to encourage positive clicks,” he added.
Even though Google may be sustaining big brands’ high rankings on Search, creating quality personalized content still says a lot about your brand and how you’re building it.
"You need to build a business, and I think that's what a lot of what I see in the leaked documents and modules speak to that. 'Is this a real site that's doing real business and trying to establish something?'" Kohn concluded.
