Last week, Google leaked 2,500 pages of internal documentation by accidentally pushing these docs to their GoogleAPI GitHub repo.

A collection of 2,500 leaked internal documents from Google filled with details about data the company collects is authentic, the company confirmed today. Until now, Google had refused to comment on the materials.

These documents were also leaked Apache 2.0 “irrevocable copyright license” when released under normal circumstances.

The fun thing about accidentally publishing to the GoogleAPI GitHub is that, while these are sensitive internal documents, Google technically released them under an Apache 2.0 license. That means anyone who stumbled across the documents was granted a “perpetual, worldwide, non-exclusive, no-charge, royalty-free, irrevocable copyright license” to them, so these are freely available online now, like here.

www.theverge.com/2024/5/29…

Several SEO experts have proven that Google has lied to web developers for over a decade. While I don’t have any remorse for the SEO industry, knowing “best practices” is good for anyone who builds a website and wants a chance to reasonably rank.

So, while Google has been called out for years for misleading the general public, now a trove of documents prove it.

Both Fishkin and King accuse Google of “lying” to SEO experts in the past. One of the revelations in the documents is that the click-through rate of a search result listing affects its ranking, something Google has denied goes into the results “stew” on several occasions. The click tracking system is called “Navboost,” in other words, boosting websites users navigate to. Naturally, a lot of this click data comes from Chrome, even when you leave search. For instance, some results can show a small set of “sitemap” results below the main listing, and apparently a part of what powers this is the most-popular subpages as determined by Chrome’s click tracking. arstechnica.com/gadgets/2…

As a web developer, what’s frustrating is how obvious spammy some of the top websites are that mirror websites like python.org’s content and add spammy ads and content and somehow outrank the biggest programming language on the planet’s docs.

None of this is new. I have seen the same spammy websites for years, which led me to drop Google Search for Kagi so I could stop seeing them.

Behavior never lies.