Comment on “Google’s Presence in vogue.com” by T. E. Fishkin and A. A. K. King

Some of the data that was detailed in the documents may be used in the search rankings of the internet giant. The documents provide an unprecedented look under the hood of a system that is shaping the web.

Google has not responded to The Verge’s requests for comment regarding the documents, including a direct request to refute their legitimacy. Fishkin told The Verge in a email that the company didn’t deny the leak, but an employee demanded to change language in a post about how the event was described.

“‘Lied’ is harsh, but it’s the only accurate word to use here,” King writes. “While I don’t necessarily fault Google’s public representatives for protecting their proprietary information, I do take issue with their efforts to actively discredit people in the marketing, tech, and journalism worlds who have presented reproducible discoveries.”

One example cited by Fishkin and King is whether Google Chrome data is used in ranking at all. Google representatives have repeatedly indicated that it doesn’t use Chrome data to rank pages, but Chrome is specifically mentioned in sections about how websites appear in Search. The documents show that Chrome data can be used to create links under the main vogue.com URL.

Another question raised is what role, if any, E-E-A-T plays in ranking. E-E-A-T stands for experience, expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness, a Google metric used to evaluate the quality of results. Google representatives have previously said E-E-A-T isn’t a ranking factor. Fishkin notes that he hasn’t found much in the documents mentioning E-E-A-T by name.

King shows how a field on a page appears to collect author data and whether the person on the page is the author. A portion of the documents shared by King reads that the field was “mainly developed and tuned for news articles… but is also populated for other content (e.g., scientific articles).” Bylines are an explicit ranking metric, though this isn’t confirmation, it does show that GOOGLE is keeping track of this attribute. According to the previous statements by the representatives from the company, author bylines should not be done for readers, but for website owners.