Updated A trove of documents that appear to describe how Google ranks search results have surfaced online, likely as a result of the accidental release of an internal bot.
Google ranking factors (leaked)
The leaked documentation describes an old version of Google's Content Warehouse API and provides a glimpse into Google Search's inner workings.
The material appears to have been inadvertently added to a publicly available Google-owned repository on GitHub around March 13 by the web giant's own automated tools. That automation took an Apache 2.0 open source license on commit, which is standard for Google's public documentation. A follow-up commitment on May 7 attempted to fix the leak.
The material was nevertheless discovered by Erfan Azimi, CEO of Search Engine Optimization (SEO) at EA Digital Eagle, and then revealed on Sunday by fellow SEO operators Rand Fishkin, CEO of SparkToro and Michael King, CEO of iPullRank.
