Google Algorithm Leak: NavBoost and Click Data Exposed

[Music] hey guys what's up it's Charles float here and welcome back to the channel and welcome back to another episode where I'll be interviewing SEO entrepreneurs and experts from around the world in today's episode we've got a very very very special interview for you today please welcome the man who leaked the Google algorithm aan am easy ladies and gentlemen hey folks pleasure uh being here the the biggest news story I think in the last decade right

in like the 2020s in SEO has probably been this leak I don't think I have been in an SEO chat room in an SEO social group in anything that hasn't in some way been talking about this leak over the last few months so before we get into you know the nitty grey what everyone has come here for do you want to kind of give a bit of an introduction to everybody and where you come from who

you are sure um my name is aan and I've been actually doing AO since 2009 um not professionally though have my own site a download site and promoting downloadable software content then after a couple of months I did take a look at my at the time Google Web Master tools which is now rebranded Google search console and the site had uh I believe 50,000 um a daily traffic or monthly traffic I cannot recall correctly then it

really spiked my curiosity of how this is stuff worked um you know and essentially I started researching I um took every single detail uh which which I found valuable starting from page rank which was patented uh patented in uh 98 um then anchor tax data they use of um let's say informational informational retrieval scoring uh keyword frequency the title tag and also quality scoring system which is similar to Panda and I essentially initially uh was a

big fan of Google it was actually my dream company to work with and it was truly a great company back then you know it was a very uh creative company which had uh initially you know the search was great it was working as it was intended and in 2013 I got my first paid client um and um ran an agency for until um 2019 I took a break for two years from SEO complete break like not

touching sides not doing anything then I came back to the game in in 2020 and the combined experience we can say it's 14 years of SEO experience so far and marketing experience as well a lot of people don't know me and that's by Design actually that's by choice uh I'm not a really big fan of um the Su community that we have right now uh because of both on the black ad side also the white ad

sites which you know the buy links and the shame on everyone who actually has a pbn uh and uh and at the same time the link a Spam they do on you know publicly exposed gas boosting sites is as good even worse than actual pbn um so actually by Design um I was never involved in Su any Su conf conferences or any webinars or any any public let's say events at all and I don't think in

the future I'll be attending any of those to be honest if unless we see actually good culture change in our SEO industry that people are actually supportive helpful and they work with each other to actually work as a scientist not as let's say low testost from business people shame each other and you know they get angry frustrated and you know all that uh so that's pretty much it um and I've got known about nav boost uh

maybe for five years already uh but I didn't know the intern name until the leak came out from another source in 2019 I believe which mentioned the word nav boost then I connected the dots uh then here we are with the biggest Su news ever and the largest the most significant valuable information about how Google search works uh from their own internal documentations 100% I think that you just covered a lot of points there that I

I want to try back track on a little bit um first of all I I completely agree with you I first started out and I was a Google Fanboy just like you right I think I when I first started out in SEO it was about the time that Google Glass was coming out and it like blew my mind that this was going to be you know the future of the I think everybody who first saw that

was just completely blown away by this kind of wearable technology obviously it didn't come to fruition but at the time I remember having these you know crazy you know emotional reactions and things that nowadays I feel has just been slowly eroded away by Google's actions and engineers and their company and the way that they've handled things and and the way that a lot of the internet has moved towards as a result of Google's core actions right

it feels like they are the company that has the most amount of influence on the internet and as a direct result of the internet quality suffering that is a lot of it is tied into Google's own action being tied to that so I I do have a lot of you know original love for Google as a company when they first started their Innovation their technology the difference that they made the even the Acquisitions that they made

very early on were very very clever Acquisitions like YouTube is probably the best acquisition any company has ever made in history to be honest at this stage and I really do think that that platform will continue to grow and even if Google dies it's still YouTube right I do think however that the company like you said has just slowly slowly moved away from that search quality results towards taking away clicks and moving them arguably either not

even necessarily into their own Pockets yes a lot of the time it is to profiter on their ads but a lot of the time it's also just favoring their corporate Partners which just feels like this a kind of reflection of the real world where everything is just moving towards this like you know the the kind of top of the funnel uh property where all these large corporations are just taking more and more of the pie and

less and less is being given to them them you know the man in the middle and the this the men at the bottom and I think that's a reflection of the real world in Google's atmosphere and it's a horrible reflection to be honest so Google's Engineers have said a lot of things a lot of the time where did you come up with the idea to find this research how did you find this leak in the first

place uh so I was doing an so I knew about nav boost um so actually um 2019 when the leak came out which mentioned the word nav boost and it talked about clicks and dock anchors being the most significant ranking factors so dark anchors let's call it uh contextual links um the anchor system which is links and then I had to figure what this s boost is and I got connect um at that leak I connected

that to um the clicks and user interactions but at the time Google was denying that they use the they use any sort of Click data in Google's search results they were they were telling all you do if you use all of these things for personalization and testing and evaluation and all of that [ __ ] they actually use it directly in the search results and uh so I was very curious I very much trusted John Miller back then

there was a weekly office hours Hangouts uh and which J Google's John Miller which is their their old name is search and uh search uh Web Master Trends analyst which is what theb Masters do and Reporting it to the community and also reporting it to googlers uh nowadays um it has changed the name has changed but the it's essentially the same agenda um and um so I jumped on a call with Google John Miller and asked

um you know provide a sample and I did that with a trick so asks John um if users are searching for by Viagra and click on not click on by Viagra if they choose by Viagra terms for Viagra does Google Now going to show by vagra instead and like passed for a few seconds and he yeah our systems could do that um and I said and okay but I was at that at that time I was

not sure if it was the analyzing the query lock that and Associated keyboards so let's say you search for Viagra and change query to BU Viagra that could make sense as well but I wanted to actually because I know I knew the fact will not be giving me the answer so I had to get it so I used the technique so I asked so in order to get information from someone you need to provide inacurate information

so they can correct you instead so I asked John but I've seen people manipulated using Bots and I said then no no no no no no no it's unlikely it's we do have a lot of practice with that practice was actually word he used and uh and he said we like already doing a great job with uh our ads system ads click fraud click spam detection systems um and I said but I've seen people actually manipulate

it says if clicks do in this way then uh then yeah it can be used or whatever and then I knew about it for for years five years four years and I kept this to myself every time Google was like denying the use of interaction data I was like God damn it a good person doesn't lie at this don't say anything no comment provide no comment but don't lie and um then I wanted to actually strike

I really wanted to actually get a Google uh to actually have an interview with him I'm providing all the doj evidence unseen documents to use that they can't use as an Evidence to actually strike them it didn't work the Google declined my request and uh I came home but he gave some internal names of Google systems which was helpful and um at the time me being heartbreaking let's say you know because you know you receive a

rejection for a day or two you're like oh my God that's not good I started searching I started you know Googling every single internal name that I had to find some documentations around nav boost out of luck thanks to God thanks to Karma I found it on Google Z search results and when I came across a document I was not surprised not emotional not let's say overwhelm emotions at all I was like oh cool um so

I had the I had um access to the leak around maybe five to seven days before actually send the toan Fishin so we can actually write uh an article about that expose Google's evil lying mechanisms for controlling the directions of web Masters I emailed Rand Fishin um on uh in May I believe uh um but it took took him few weeks before he was actually um comfortable enough on jumping on an interview to discuss um Na

the nav system so the call was not supposed to be about the leak but it was supposed to be about nav boost um because nav boost is what I really cared about I was not intending to make the whole thing public and uh after a few emails after I believe 15 to 20 days Rand finally um um you know uh we actually jumped on the call and then the the call started uh R being very skeptical

and very hesitant of it but he did some due diligence and turned out to be legitimate plane and then there's s this story the biggest leak of let's say from any search Eng so far with regards to the market share that they have there is also Yandex link but who cares about Yandex to be honest if you in in North American market so as you just said about Google's Engineers right John Mueller was hesitant in his

initial reply do you think that anybody at Google has been 100% % honest the entire time and or do you think it's a case of they're being as honest as what they are told themselves it's not that they have got access to all of this information or is it that they are being told to say something else which do you obviously I just want your opinion we don't need to know if it's fact but I was

just wondering do you think they're being told not to say X Y and Z or is it that this is what they believe because of what they're being shown in their own internal team I believe they just uh they know about it to some extent but don't want the public to manipulate their search engines and their systems and for example in in in our call John confirmed nav boost the effect of nav boost and I believe

it just comes from a leadership point of view which says seos dead this with page rank let's just not talk about the use of Click data in the Google search rankings ly is not only moral but if you get caught lying to the police or in a court of law you did you did something illegal and we take lying very seriously um both on the ethical terms and also on the legal terms no man has the

power to lie and get away from it it just doesn't happen and um and there was a leak not a leak um a teral from a couple of years ago anti I believe doj which the one Google engineer testified that um they actually tell us not to talk about the use of click in search rankings he said I didn't get any quotes on that why the reason might be but he speculated it may be actually related

to not wanting seos to optimize for it artificially and uh and at the same time I don't believe John Miller or the public relations team are told everything but they clearly knew about Naf boost so I actually think that in terms of the lying thing from an ethical and moral point of view right I think it's easier when you can put it down to the fact that you're like protecting your employer or you're protecting your corporation

right and if anything they're saying that it's not a human lying I am a spokesperson for this entity and I am just regurgitating whatever this is saying and this isn't a person right and so that's probably where I think their defense is coming from but it's it's so it's so saying it's so telling that since this leak I haven't seen John's Twitter this quiet in a long long long long long time you know like he hasn't

I've been blocked by John Miller that that doesn't surprise me because he's blocked everybody on Twitter to be fair he even blocked um the organizer of like affiliate Gathering York who is the cleanest of like most white hat he's a YouTuber like he makes YouTube videos about like affiliate stuff it's he's not an SEO and he even blocked him um so I I it's quite surprising that John hasn't blocked me but then apparently they read my

tweets so that's the other side of things right um I I will say that I do think that this entire leak that Google is kind of in a position now where whatever the engineers say going forward it's all going to be taken with a grain of Sal they've kind of lost a lot of their credibility now as a direct result of this leak and I personally think that that's a good thing because I don't think that

we should have ever really been re it's you shouldn't have been reliant on as we say in the UK reliant on straight from the horse's mouth straight from the horse's mouth you shouldn't have been relying on something that is in in uh in essence bias right so you're relying on the person who is in control and who benefits the most out of you not manipulating them to be actually be reliant on them telling you the truth

that doesn't fully make sense to me right um do you think that as a result of this Google will become less reliant on click data or they'll try to push the algorithm to become less reline on do you think they'll just say [ __ ] it let's go all in and it's now all click dat you know that depends if uh seo's manipulated to an extent that becomes a very noisy signal uh in the in the first place

they'll try to combat it using additional spam systems for example penguin for links now they will have a uh seep algorithm for clicks and on top of that they they actually readjust the scoring process for nav boost uh that's the first step but if those attempts which may take months to years fail nav boost becomes a very very unreliable now they may actually replace it with another system and uh but it may actually take years and

I don't think as a result of the leak a lot is going to change but defenses are going to be built to combat manipulations which are already there in in the first place as well even before the leak and a lot of people claimed uh even before the leak that their headless browser as if residential and for prce actually works [ __ ] for organic SEO complete [ __ ] it doesn't work why if if if it works then why

haven't you get any result on this they claim okay you know I got a spike in banking for like five hours for you know for a keyword with like 10 search volume and and at the same time built links to it I did all of that you know you understand it's just snake oil you know um but people try to make such claims although nav boost theoretically could be manipulated potentially could be manipulated but it's very

hard it's very hard so I'm going to some ways of people actually try to manate na boost so there was um company I believe uh I've been told this story of how they actually manipulated na boost so do you know about this TV receivers there this you know TV receivers which are you know connect um are connected to the internet a company actually use this particular receivers uh with the home's IP address and they use some

sort of a smart browser which I'm not going to name any details to perent manipulation and that smart browser was configured in a way uh that uh made things look natural and they sold this receiver to thousands of thousands of people and they had the they had this powerful gigantic Network we doing click fraud manipulation and also nav boost manipulation and on top of that zombie traffic traffic coming from hacked devices na nav could be used

to manipulate that but it is illegal and it's immoral if someone if someone who's watching this if you get caught doing that it's jail time so it's possible to manipulate it it's gameable uh but it's very very difficult this tool claiming it does CTR manipulation may not your be may not be your answer for influencing the influencing the rankings in the long term I I know that people's first question is going to be okay so how

is it so complicated why is it so complicated right and I think I can immediately answer that for for you and it basically is if somebody is searching for a query right you're trying to manipulate natural user behavior for that query do you know how difficult it is just to even get the maths right to try and know how many clicks that result a number nine or number 10 or whatever is going to get to naturally

then incrementally be increased to go to number one just getting the math on that alone right and getting the timings right so it doesn't all come in the same time and it's not spamming and it's drip fed all of that is just so comp at in and of itself that the only people that I've ever really seen be very good at it at scale is the French right and that's because they're so interconnected with their community

that they've got these crazy bot networks and they've got all these crazy intricate um networks and things going on because they Shar together and that ends up creating this kind of U enabling them to have got all this data on like Sur statistics and and Sur um clickthrough rates and all these kind of crazy stuff that combined across different niches and that it's got categorized they've gone so deep down this rabbit hole but it's exactly what

you just said without their their willingness to connect with each other and without that willingness to share and be open and again I think it's because they're French right they're inherently going to be that Community right the French Community very much so like being inside of their own Community they tend to not go go kind of with outside of it but and they're more inherently trustworthy of each other right I think because they have that that's

why it succeeded so well and I think shows that it hasn't succeeded very well because though that sense of community doesn't really happen in basically any other country or Market or anything like that and it's a bit of a shame really and I've always said that you know it it shouldn't be white hat versus SEO it should or white hat versus black hat it should be SEO versus Google right like that's what the community should get

back towards the entire place right and I've said that for a long long time yeah and I can tell you about the European Community they're very technical very data driven we don't have that in the US it's all fluff it's just personal branding who posts fancy case studies on Twitter for reshares yeah big shout out to the Polish Community as well because I went to their confence oh man the technical level there like every othero is

a like full stack developer it was genuinely insane like it was so impressive big shout out to them yeah I mean it's such a shame of the um the North American SE community that that we have it's just not very diverse at the same time it's not very technically powerful it just you know it just they mostly care about you know retweets shares followers oh let's destroy that guy let's let's destroy this guy but at the

end of the day this this smart European uh guy is actually doing some machine learning stuff for data intell that guy doesn't have a think in in Twitter he's not publishing anything there getting results yeah exactly and some of those results are you know levels and levels and levels ahead of some of the results that you know the American to get but but shout out to a lot of great folks too which um you know they

do an amazing work um in in the in the US but at least they try to not um not the best quality of services not the best results not the best technical acknowledge but at least you know they're not giving up and that's good I I respect that yeah i' I've met a lot of Americans that have come over to the European conferences especially the British ones and they're like wow we do not have this in

the US you know like the level of these talks and the level of the attendees and everything is just so much higher than in the US and I I think again it's to do with that corporatization where the wrong people get sent to these events and things it's all like these kind of you know event level sales staff and things like that when actually you want the people who are actually doing the stuff to be sent

to these events representing you engaging learning adapting getting to that next level right but it just absolutely like that is the case and I I also think that to some extent the American kind of social system the best people in America in terms of SE are probably actually the quietest they they tend to have that kind of more controlled or you know self in you know kind of in a introverted ego rather than kind of the

loud American eyes you know big as big as we can possibly be kind of thing which is where you get probably the the kind of uh more of that corporatization stuff where whereas I actually like listening to the little guys who maybe got the quieted voices who are kind of coming up on stage and like hey guys it's nice to see you kind of thing but those are the ones that you want to be listen to

they're the the real Geeks are the ones that you're going to get the most out out from so I I I can't speak volumes enough if you've been American you don't think much of the SEO conference is come to one of the European ones if you if you don't know which one to come to drop me a DM I've been to basically all of them I'll give you some recommendations right um so I wanted to actually

ask you about Google itself and if you've been contacted by Google after the after the after the leak I know that Dan Petrovic who also had access to this file he did a Google bug Bounty request initially and they actually declined it and said that it wasn't a bug and then backtrack late Dr you paid him about $10,000 or so so it turns out it was actually not meant to be released have you been contacted by

Google if there's been any kind of legal repercussions as a result of this is you know have you had any problems that's a good question I got in the first three days of the leak I got a lot of LinkedIn views from googlers uh both from the Le their legal team and from their Engineers too from YouTube as well from chrome as well and in fact uh I believe the head of financing Chrome looked at my

looked at my profile twice within one single day um then I posted about um U I'm sure you've seen it the Google come after me video come after me I'm not afraid of you and I mentioned one name which looked at my profile during that time a lawyer she got me blocked so essentially if uh if they're fighting is their only if the only weapon they have is for their combat is blocking which is a very

uh not any any useful tool in a real world no I don't like you I'm going to block you essentially uh if you block someone that means you're afraid or or that means you don't like me or you disgusted by me or you're really scared given the video was actually me telling them come after me if you have anything on me I would say it's we cannot do anything about you part and we're afraid of you

I I also think they shot themselves in the foot right because of how they distributed it they distributed it via patchy licensing right which which gives Universal distribution lights like automatically so like they kind of just massively I think their their legal team is going to be like right how are we Distributing our content from now on even internally because that licensing has screwed us massively just on the repercussion side of thing because they literally gave

you the license to go and publish it you know what I mean like like literally like it's actually insane don't want to keep you too long I know that you're a busy guy I know that you you don't necessarily want to be too involved in the public space and aness your and stff but for those people do want to come and find you online and maybe have a bit more interaction is there anywh that people can

find you online well thankfully I'm not on only fans because my business is doing very good you can find me at LinkedIn or visit my agency side I don't have any details on the agency side just a website that I have uh just have a website I don't work on it at all um LinkedIn is the best way to get in touch and also my personal side just type my personal name at the keyboard SEO you'll

find my site and also my agency site um these are the best ways to get in touch with me if to your sites next I don't care they can do anything they want I'm not afraid that's that I that's a perfect message to end on to be honest so I appreciate you coming on I'll leave links destion for your LinkedIn and your personal website so people can go visit it there as well uh thank you for

coming once again I'll see you guys in the next episode Peace thank you guys byebye