Google Leak Document Findings: Key Takeaways SEO for Bloggers & Small Publishers

This past week, news of a major Google leak broke in the SEO community. Many of the leaked documents contained information we already knew, but quite a few enlightened us on some Google practices that have, up to now, been a mystery.

I want to highlight 2 things in particular that are relevant to bloggers and a good follow-up to the webinar we did on Tuesday, May 28th:

Having a strong brand matters and powerful brands will always outrank smaller ones. Smaller sites in the SHE Media Collective should focus on building a brand that is popular and well-recognized outside of Google Search. Signaling strong authorship by creating an Author Bio and About Us page is helpful for building trust. “Google stores author information associated with the content and tries to determine whether an entity is the author of the document.” Getting mentioned on other sites/platforms in addition to actively engaging with your users (running events, responding to comments on your site or social media, etc.) are also ways to cultivate a good reputation.
Small businesses and newer content creators are not going to benefit as much from SEO until they've established a level of credibility. This reinforces my advice that bloggers find ways to grow their audience independently of Google given the current state of the industry. Evidence shows that Google is ranking and sending traffic to bigger sites with more authority, allowing them to dominate the web. If you’re a smaller publisher, your content is less likely to perform well on Google if there are bigger and more well-known brands producing similar content as you. This doesn’t mean you should abandon or ignore SEO. It just means you shouldn’t put all your eggs in the Google basket. Focus on diversifying your audience and distributing content on other platforms as well to reach a new and wider audience.