As you can imagine, it's difficult to summarize everything that's found in such a massive leak, but Fishkin and King's work has some particularly striking findings. Trying to find a common denominator for all of them, Fishkin explains that "If I had one universal piece of advice for marketers looking to vastly improve their rankings and organic search traffic, it would be: 'Build a notable, popular, and well-recognized brand in your industry, outside of Google search.'"
But the leak reveals much more.
Clicks do count for rankings
The leaked documentation reveals modules that mention features such as “goodClicks,” “badClicks,” “lastLongestClicks,” impressions, and “squashed” and “unsquashed” clicks. These are linked to armenia number data Navboost and Glue, which work together to rank and display results on the search results page (SERP). The anonymous leaker explained that in its early years, Google needed comprehensive click data to improve the quality of its results. A system called “NavBoost” collected data from the PageRank toolbar and motivated the creation of the Chrome browser in 2008 to obtain more click data.
The documentation reflects how Google filters out unwanted clicks and measures click duration (the time a visitor stays on the page they landed on after clicking). In addition, Google uses geotargeting of Navboost data and click signals to improve the accuracy of results. These findings highlight Google's sophistication in using click data to evaluate and rank websites, adding further evidence about its inner workings.
Additionally, the documents suggest that Google calculates various metrics using Chrome view data for individual pages and entire domains. For example, the documentation indicates that Google likely uses the number of clicks on pages in Chrome browsers to determine a site's most popular and important URLs , which are included in the Sitelinks feature.