Google's Leaked Internal Presentation: "Don't Talk About Clicks"

0:00If you want to know why doing SEO for your website can feel so hard sometimes, this internal presentation from Google from around the end of 2018 explains why. This presentation was dug up during discovery of Google's antitrust trial. The language used in it is pretty shocking. The opening slide is ranking for research. Access to this document is restricted to specific people in research who are working actively to improve search, not people with a general interest in the topic. A few slides later, there's an outline and the number one bullet on the outline is be careful in discussing search. This is what it says. Be careful in discussing

0:40search. Having a big positive impact on the world is a joy of working on search, but this impact makes our words and actions carry heavy consequences. So, we must tread carefully. Okay, here it is. This is crazy. Attempts to manipulate search results and this is in a Google presentation. An internal Google presentation that was dug up during discovery during Google's antitrust trial. Attempts to manipulate search results are continuous, sophisticated, and well-funded. Information about how

1:09search works should remain need-to-know. We are sued often. All emails involving people in search are likely to be retained in connection with multiple ongoing lawsuits. Internal communications have been repeatedly leaked to the press and cast in a bad light. Around the world, we endure multiple negative press cycles weekly. Then, there's a few slides with examples of Google having to go through different

1:35lawsuits, all of this making the news. It says the EU fined Google 2.2 billion euros in connection with an aspect of search. Search issues can inflame the world leaders who have power over Google demand congressional hearings, etc. We never know when the next regulatory action or subpoena will hit. There's There's about Facebook and Cambridge Analytica. Then there's this particularly sensitive topic slide. This slide in particular explains why you might not always get the most straightforward answers from Google. It says, "Keep talk about how search works on a need-to-know basis. Everything we leak will be used against us by SEOs, let's go by SEOs, patent trolls, competitors, etc. Discuss social

2:22fairness in search results with great caution." This is an important topic that we must all take very seriously. But how will your email read to reporters, to regulators, and litigants? Avoid statements that might be perceived as anti-competitive. For example, why aren't we ranking this Alphabet-related product higher? How can we knock down such and such site? And it says, "We do not do such things." There's a sensitive topic slide. Do not discuss political bias in search in writing, in writing it says. This is another important topic that we take seriously, but it's just too volatile for email. Which honestly, to be fair, if you've been doing SEO for

3:01a while, you have a deep understanding of the media. And if the emails leak, it could be pretty volatile. And then there's a postscript. Two weeks after this talk was initially given, Google CEO was called to testify on this topic before Congress. Then it says, "Oh yeah, here we go." It says, "Do not discuss the use of clicks in search except on a need-to-know basis with people who understand not to talk about this topic externally." Google has a public position. The public position is, "It is debatable, but please don't craft your own." And so, I want to call back to Google search analyst Gary Illyes's comments on Rand Fishkin. Before I say

3:41what the comment is, Rand Fishkin did a bunch of tests around click-through rate in the search results. Rand Fishkin is the founder of Moz. He's been on this podcast a a of times now. He's awesome. Over 10 years ago, he used his large social media following to have them search a keyword and then click on his result. In one test, he got 228 clicks in 3 hours, moving his page from number seven on Google to number one in 3 hours because of the 228 clicks that came from his social media audience. He just put out tweets. He put out posts on Twitter saying, "Hey, please search this and

4:16click this." He tried another test. He was ranking number 10. In 3 hours, he got 375 clicks to his page on Google, and at the end of those 3 hours, he was ranking number one. Now, this presentation from 2018 says, "Do not discuss the use of clicks in search except on a need-to-know basis with people who understand not to talk about this topic externally." And so, Google search analyst Gary Illyes said, "Dwell time, click-through rate, whatever Fishkin's new theory is, those are generally made-up crap." Gary said this in a Reddit ask me anything. Rand proved this with his tests. Other people went on to prove this with tests. And then, during

4:58the May 2024 Google API leak, it was revealed that clicks are so important to Google, Google literally created the Chrome browser to track clicks, to track clicks in the search results, and other clicks, clicks on links within websites, so much because Google has Chrome. And to be fair towards Google, they say on a previous slide, again, "Everything we leak will be used against us by SEOs, patent trolls, competitors, etc." And a lot of people game Google search results

5:28with click-through rate manipulation. It's very common. It's still common. It's quite dangerous, but it is common. Something you might wonder after hearing this presentation is, if the people working on Google's algorithms aren't allowed to talk about how they work, how is Google's John Mueller, John Mueller is Google's search advocate, basically seen at this point as the face of Google search. He relates how Google search works to marketers, to SEOs. Then there was Danny Sullivan, who was Google search liaison. How are they getting their information? This information, by the way, is used a ton by SEOs to help understand how search works and what people can and can't do. So, in 2024, on

6:09X, a dude called Rob, that's literally his handle on X, said, "At times you both speak very confidently about what the algorithm is supposed to do or how it's supposed to behave. However, sometimes it's difficult to draw the line between what you say and what we see. Where do you get this information from?" And Danny Sullivan said, "We work for the search quality team. We're part of that. The engineers who are coding our systems, we talk to them. They talk to us." So, if you wondered if Danny Sullivan and John Mueller were working on the algorithms at Google themselves, as in they're the program- grammers behind it, they talk to those

6:47programmers. But at the end of the day, the programmers are still deciding what to share and what not to share. The good news is, as a community, SEOs have decades very thoroughly experimenting what works and what does not work. And we share these experiments. We share the results. And I'm grateful that lots of the best SEOs in the world come on this podcast to share their stories, to share their findings. And also, as somebody who's been doing SEO for a long time myself, the longer you do SEO, the more you get a deep feel for how these algorithms work and what they respond to. When you've been doing SEO, you know

7:23how overpowered relevance is, for example. You know how one great backlink can really move the needle. You know what a natural backlink profile looks like. You know that branded searches matter. You know that you want searchers to click on the links within your index pages. You learn all sorts of stuff by doing SEO for a long time. and then we as a community, we come together to share these things. So, even if Google will not talk about all the minute details, because they can't, because it will be used against them. If you want to learn SEO, there are people like me, people like my guests, who still share

7:58how search works, what to do, what's riskier, experiments, all sorts of fun stuff. And on the topic of learning how search works, there are two final slides from this presentation I want to share. The first is called search quality has many aspects. I'm going to read all of these. It says relevance, page quality, popularity, freshness, localization, language, centrality, topical diversity, personalization, web ecosystem, mobile-friendly, social fairness, optionalization, porn demotion, spam, authority, privacy, user control of spell correction. Capturing everything in a metric is tough. Then this last slide, basic control flow. And it's a flowchart about how you put out a document into search, it gets crawled and indexed. A searcher puts in a query,

8:49so does a search. The query is interpreted. This is where things like synonyms, spelling, intent interpretation, query expansion, these related concepts come into play. Then the query and the index document come together to get scored. It's a system that retrieves candidate pages, assigns ranking scores to them. Finally, the scored results are taken, and then further adjustments are made. So, this is closer to the final assembly or re-ranking stage. Because there's things that happen where like Google will literally put in intentional volatility to make it harder to figure out how search works. Google has a patent on this. Google literally will not give you the ranking that it should give you. It

9:34won't give it to you immediately, because it doesn't want searchers to figure out how search works. I made an episode about this, episode 974 of the podcast, Google's new AI patent could replace your website. I talk about two Google patents there, and the second patent is the rank modifying spammer patent, which literally calls out spammers in the patent to say, "We're trying to trick the spammers so they

9:59don't figure out how search works." Anyway, search really isn't that hard. The Pareto of it is optimize for relevance, take your target keyword, put that in the page title, URL slug, H1, beginning of the first sentence, satisfy the keyword's intent above the fold before people start scrolling, try to build real backlinks, backlinks on pages that are indexed, backlinks that get clicked, get your foundational links, think about how a real business will go and create profiles on as many social media platforms and directories as they can because most businesses they want to be in all the relevant places. Get your foundational links in. Be active on social media, drive branded searches. A

10:41lot of these things are very straightforward. So, even though Google's not going to tell you exactly how Google works, we have all these experiments, the collective experience of the SEO community, and with a bit of critical thinking, a lot of things are easy to understand on your own. If you want to go deeper, I have an SEO course about how to do search engine optimization that specifically targets people looking to buy something, use something, make a discovery call. It's a 13 and 1/2 hour course, super thorough, step-by-step. I made this video a few days ago about some testimonials I got last week. Got this email 51 minutes

11:15ago. Hi Edward, I have never bought a course before. I bought yours. Check out my results. Look at that. Let's go. 50 conversions in the last 30 days. Between all my other responsibilities, I barely have time to work on this, so I'm sure I'm making mistakes. Still, this is one of our most promising growth initiatives, all thanks to you. Oh my

11:39gosh. I got this other one 3 days ago. This person is doing SEO for clients. Says, we wouldn't have these good of results from our minimum website packages without the tips from your course. Best SEO course I've come across in 13 years. I feel truly empowered and in control of my SEO skills. Thank you, Kylie. Thank you, Jack. If you haven't seen my SEO course yet, it's about how to do search engine optimization that gets paying customers, users, warm leads calling you up, and you can get it at

12:12compactkeywords.com. So many people are loving the course. You are going to be one of them. That's everything that I got for you on this episode of the show. This is episode 1,174 of the podcast. 1,174 days in a row doing this show. If you watch this on YouTube, thank you so much for watching. If you listened on Spotify or Apple Podcasts, thank you so much for listening. And I will talk to you again

12:38tomorrow. Bye now.