A purported leak of 2,500 pages of internal documentation from Google sheds light on how Search, the most powerful arbiter of the internet, operates.
The leaked documents touch on topics like what kind of data Google collects and uses, which sites Google elevates for sensitive topics like elections, how Google handles small websites, and more. Some information in the documents appears to be in conflict with public statements by Google representatives, according to Fishkin and King.
Historically, Google had a give-and-take with SEO. You can’t make SEO companies go away, but you can curb the worst behavior. Google used to punish bad behavior with a poor listing, and you had to do some work to get it back into compliance and tell Google it’s fixed up.
It wasn’t ideal, but it functioned well enough.
The drive to make search more profitable over the past few years seems to have meant dropping this. SEO companies can get away with whatever. If they now have the whole manual, game over. Google of a decade ago might have done something about it. Google of today won’t bother.