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My event SEO IRL happens this October 6-7 in Toronto, Canada. You’ll hear from speakers including, Nathan Gotch, Lily Ray, Michal Suski, Joy Hawkins, Ex-Googler Jyll Saskin, myself and more It’s a beautiful time to visit Toronto, so come and join us! Curious about visiting Toronto in the fall? Visit: https://seoirl.com/book/

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Howdy Notebooker!

Edward Sturm posted something last week that I haven't been able to stop thinking about… a PDF from Google DOJ hearings.

It's a Google internal training deck called Ranking for Research, dated November 16, 2018. The first slide says access is restricted to specific people inside Google Research who are actively working on search. Not Google employees generally. It’s for “people in Research who are actively working to improve search.”

It's was shared as exhibit UPX0204 in the DOJ's antitrust case against Google. You can download it from justice.gov here.

Edward's take is that SEO has already been figured out. We figured it out years ago, in public, with experiments. Google denied it. Then the DOJ made them hand over the paperwork.

P.S. there’s a practical tip at the end of the note, but there is so much “tea” in this PDF, I had to include it first!

Let's get into it.

🎧 Listen to this note (11 min): Open player

https://radar.notebookers.com/media/notes/3d48c368-5191-8032-9609-f868c5df7765.mp3

📺 Watch this note (9 min): Open player

Plays at 1.5x. Normal speed on the player page.

Plays at 1.5x. Normal speed on the player page.

The deck has a section literally says "Be careful in discussing search." Here's what it tells Google's own researchers.

One. Attempts to manipulate search results are described as continuous, sophisticated and well funded. So information about how search works should stay need-to-know.

Two. Anything that leaks gets used against Google by SEOs, patent trolls and competitors.

Three. And this is the one that made me sit up.

Google instructed its own research staff not to discuss the use of clicks in search, except on a need-to-know basis with people who understood not to talk about it externally. The reason given: Google already has a public position on clicks, that position is debatable, and staff shouldn't craft their own.