SEARCHENGINES
Google Says No We Are Not Stealing Your Content & Citing Itself As The Author

The other day Gianluca Fiorelli posted on Twitter that he felt Google was taking content from third party sites and placing that content on in the Google Search knowledge panels but sourcing itself, Google, as the author of that content and not the site it is sourcing it from. Well, Google said that is not true, that it is the other way around.
Google said that the content was written by Google employees and the sites you thought wrote it originally actually stole it from Google and put it on their own sites. I did dig into some examples and noticed that many actually didn’t have that content on their site until recently, a few months ago, whereas Google likely had that content there for years. It is very hard to prove either way, but we know Google has been writing its own knowledge panels since 2018 – so it is more likely that these sites stole the content from Google – word for word – than Google stealing the content from those third party sites and not citing them.
Here are the allegations from Gianluca Fiorelli posted on Twitter:
… and discovered how practically all of them are copy-paste of Italian websites.
I repeated the experiment, and I can confirm the same result.
If Google is using AI, it is trained for stealing the content that better fits the K. Panel design.
Follow to see a few examples.— Gianluca Fiorelli (@gfiorelli1) April 26, 2022
Piemonte. The content is 100% copied from this page: https://t.co/4usIWl10Xg pic.twitter.com/PHfFNIxvFW
— Gianluca Fiorelli (@gfiorelli1) April 26, 2022
So… Is Google the author of these Knowledge Panel texts? Clearly, it does not seem so!
Is it using AI? Hard to say. If it uses it, is for understanding which all the indexed content fits better in the KG Panel.
Is the most authoritative? Sincerely not. Correct, but not really..— Gianluca Fiorelli (@gfiorelli1) April 26, 2022
There is a bit of a gap in the middle but click on the first tweet to scan them all.
Then Danny Sullivan of Google replies:
This is why in 2020, we added the – Google credit to indicate we authored the description. See also: https://t.co/55xDApET0S
— Danny Sullivan (@dannysullivan) April 26, 2022
He then goes further the next day:
The first line of the description in that YouTube video matches what you’ll find in this news article from the same year: https://t.co/2DEEum6zHe
Did they also pick it up from the same YouTube video? It doesn’t make a lot of sense…
— Danny Sullivan (@dannysullivan) April 26, 2022
I’ll see if I can track down when we first stared authoring descriptions, but it was likely before 2018. It was only in 2018 that we got asked about it (as I said in my earlier reply).
— Danny Sullivan (@dannysullivan) April 26, 2022
Following up, we were authoring descriptions from at least 2015. In 2016, we had a blog post that talked about some of this work with destinations; you can see one of our descriptions in an embedded YouTube video in that post (34 seconds in): https://t.co/aVBjCAwhos
— Danny Sullivan (@dannysullivan) April 28, 2022
Even before Danny replied to any of this, Glenn Gabe also felt that Google was being copied from, not the other way around:
I’ll check again, but I think at least one of those pages hasn’t existed for very long. I didn’t have time to dig in too much, but worth noting.
— Glenn Gabe (@glenngabe) April 26, 2022
Brodie Clark as well:
This has come up in the past. When investigating, I found that it was the opposite (other sites taking Google’s content). Though it can be tricky to track down the original source when this started happening 4+ years ago.. A more detailed explanation from Google would be helpful. https://t.co/TQ0vlRbQ6q
— Brodie Clark (@brodieseo) April 27, 2022
In any event, this is why we have the Wayback Machine – the only issue is it is super hard to know when Google posted these in the search results. So you can believe whomever you want – I do trust Danny Sullivan, he would 100% not lie to me, despite what you all think. Google links out to sources all the time, most of the time, so I don’t see why Google would steal the content versus link to the source of the content. But maybe I am naive?
Forum discussion at Twitter.
Source: www.seroundtable.com
SEARCHENGINES
Google Says If You Redesign Your Site Your Rankings May Go Nuts

Gary Illyes from the Google Search Relations team posted another PSA on LinkedIn. This time he said, “when you redesign a site, its rankings in search engines may go nuts.”
Yes, this is probably super obvious to most of you reading this site but Gary dives a bit deeper.
He said, “Among other things, search engines use the HTML of your pages to make sense of the content. If for example you break up paragraphs, remove H tags in favor of CSS styling, or add breaking tags (especially true for CJK languages), you change the HTML parsers’ output, which in turn may change the site’s rankings.”
In short, when redesigning, sure – go ahead – make the site pretty. But changing the core HTML can result in ranking changes.
Gary recommends, “try to use semantically similar HTML when you redesign the site and avoid adding tags where you don’t actually need them.”
So if you can change the design but at the same time keep things in the HTML looking similar, that is your best bet. Change a lot without changing a lot – if that makes sense.
Forum discussion at LinkedIn.
SEARCHENGINES
Yandex Search Ranking Factors Leaked & Exposed

Yandex had a boatload of its source code across all its technology allegedly leaked by a disgruntled employee and part of that was the source code for Russia’s largest search engine – Yandex. As you can imagine, SEOs and others are diving in and seeing what they can learn from the source code.
I personally did not download the source code, so I did not go through it myself but I wanted to share what people did find via Twitter from their investigations of the source code.
Here’s the alpha version of an explorer tool for the leaked #Yandex Search code.
It lets you browse through the ranking factors, view by tags, etc, and start to find connections.
Easy to add new features if there’s anything you want to see!https://t.co/AjbYnrDl9P pic.twitter.com/pQ4scOkP6w
— Rob Ousbey : @[email protected] (@RobOusbey) January 28, 2023
I downloaded the code, analyzed it and there is a lot of useful information for Google SEO as well. pic.twitter.com/RWrgnnlpj6
— Alex Buraks (@alex_buraks) January 27, 2023
Theoretically, what is the difference between algorithms used in Google and in Yandex?
They are quite similar:
– there is RankBrain analogue – MatrixNet;
– they are using PageRank (almost the same as in Google);
– a lot of text algorithms are the same. pic.twitter.com/Djjl8Bmjwn— Alex Buraks (@alex_buraks) January 27, 2023
According to Statcounter Yandex is close to Yahoo and Bing by market share: pic.twitter.com/5GKIvKIvAo
— Alex Buraks (@alex_buraks) January 27, 2023
Main insights after analysing this list:
#1 Age of links is a ranking factor. pic.twitter.com/U47uWvEq9w
— Alex Buraks (@alex_buraks) January 27, 2023
#3 Numbers in URLs is bad for rankings pic.twitter.com/ECgwGeGUfb
— Alex Buraks (@alex_buraks) January 27, 2023
#5 Hard pessimization equal PR=0 pic.twitter.com/RRbhuJyZr1
— Alex Buraks (@alex_buraks) January 27, 2023
#7 Fun fact – there is a separate ranking factor for uplifting Wikipedia pic.twitter.com/799F8KFpkE
— Alex Buraks (@alex_buraks) January 27, 2023
#9 Document age and last update both are ranking factors. pic.twitter.com/ay1GTMVEtJ
— Alex Buraks (@alex_buraks) January 27, 2023
Right now I checked ~40% of the list, there are a lot more (about text relevancy, behaivor factors, page rank, internal links,etc).
Will continue this thread after some time.
— Alex Buraks (@alex_buraks) January 27, 2023
The first thread got a lot of impressions (500k views for the moment, thanks for you retweets and likes!), so I decided to finalize.https://t.co/UQiQsnpWd2
— Alex Buraks (@alex_buraks) January 28, 2023
#2 Additionnaly: ranking factor for orphan pages.
You can easy find them via Screming Frog or other crawlers. pic.twitter.com/zIPwAelpD0
— Alex Buraks (@alex_buraks) January 28, 2023
#4 Number of search queries of your site/url is a ranking factor.
Obviously more = better. pic.twitter.com/xXQ6FMDghP
— Alex Buraks (@alex_buraks) January 28, 2023
#6 If your url whould be the last for search session (user will find what he needs) – it whould impact rankings.
There are strict factors for this and predictible factors as well. pic.twitter.com/Zx3sBZORCs
— Alex Buraks (@alex_buraks) January 28, 2023
#8 Special ranking factors for short videos (tiktok, shorts, reels) pic.twitter.com/oKPzL09MID
— Alex Buraks (@alex_buraks) January 28, 2023
#10 Keywords in URL is a ranking factors.
As we can see from the description – the optimal would be include up to 3 words from the search query. pic.twitter.com/Q1euKWSiST
— Alex Buraks (@alex_buraks) January 28, 2023
#14 One more ranking factor for content quality – broken embedded video on the page.
Embed videos – good for rankings.
Broken embed videos – bad. pic.twitter.com/2SUys65PHp— Alex Buraks (@alex_buraks) January 28, 2023
#16 If you backlinks anchors contain all words from the keywords – it’s good for SEO.
If it is in a one link – it’s more beneficial. Especially if the order of words is the same. pic.twitter.com/WrbESJ8Da5
— Alex Buraks (@alex_buraks) January 28, 2023
#18 The quality rank of texts on the domain is a ranking factor.
Pages with low quality content affect the entire domain. pic.twitter.com/MJUCTVB9CH
— Alex Buraks (@alex_buraks) January 28, 2023
#20 Funny, there is a random as a separate ranking factor.
When you don’t understant why some of page is on top – it could be just random (to test behaivor factors). pic.twitter.com/TGtzFrmBOV
— Alex Buraks (@alex_buraks) January 28, 2023
#22 Backlinks from the top 100 best websites by PageRank impacts on rankings.
That’s not news. pic.twitter.com/ikxldWLJqy
— Alex Buraks (@alex_buraks) January 28, 2023
Wow, I just found the list with initial weights of Yandex ranking factors.
Do you need one more thread? 😁
P.S. final weights calculated by AI (matrixnet), but initial values are useful as well. pic.twitter.com/WeroYQy7Yu
— Alex Buraks (@alex_buraks) January 28, 2023
That said, I’ve been digging into the codebase myself to find things of interest.
I’m doing this live, so I don’t know how long it will take between tweets.
— Mic King (@iPullRank) January 27, 2023
A lot of the code related to Yandex Search lives in the Kernel, ExtSearch, Search, and Robot archives, but again I won’t be able to be comprehensive here until I’ve looked through everything.
— Mic King (@iPullRank) January 27, 2023
Some really interesting things in the web_meta_factors_info/factors_gen.in file as it relates to content features and factors.
For instance, some things that we’d expect like a minimum expectation of the proximity of words in a title to the words in the query. pic.twitter.com/YRsrCpVsqU
— Mic King (@iPullRank) January 27, 2023
Interestingly, there are a lot of scrapers in here Google News, Shopping, YouTube and even other Yandex services.
— Mic King (@iPullRank) January 27, 2023
Hmm…this might be the structure of how Yandex stores documents in their version of a doc server.
Still looking for an idea of how they structure their inverted index. pic.twitter.com/1lwTbOirnx
— Mic King (@iPullRank) January 27, 2023
Here’s a protobuf of link factors. pic.twitter.com/1RM6o1xzRg
— Mic King (@iPullRank) January 27, 2023
In the “link prioritizer code” they talk about decreasing the priority of links with the same text from the same host. In other words, don’t count the links from duplicate content. pic.twitter.com/dQTUnScCUy
— Mic King (@iPullRank) January 27, 2023
How did y’all come up with that number of ranking factors?
I see 481 factors just related to “Rapid Clicks” pic.twitter.com/sw5A3ia3Bk
— Mic King (@iPullRank) January 28, 2023
Similar to the Googs, Yandex has multiple ranking models to choose from.
In this select_ranking_models.cpp file, they talk about having different models for different languages and locations. pic.twitter.com/m210tpOUDb
— Mic King (@iPullRank) January 28, 2023
I’m gonna go watch TV, but I obviously have to add this to my book so I’m gonna add more over the next couple days
— Mic King (@iPullRank) January 28, 2023
Been digging into how this robot archive is structured.
It looks like the Zora directory is where a lot of interesting things are happening. There’s a limits.pb.txt file that stores the requests per second rate for the host and the IP address for 204k hosts. pic.twitter.com/0oulKm58dx
— Mic King (@iPullRank) January 28, 2023
Here’s where the Document and Query factors are collected and scored.
Looks like it goes to storage after this tho. pic.twitter.com/qJAiLfSrsU
— Mic King (@iPullRank) January 29, 2023
Ok, real quick, top 5 most positively and negatively weighted ranking factors and their coefficients in the initial weighting in Yandex’s document relevance calculation. Negatives first
#1 FI_ADV: -0.2509284637
This factor determines that there is advertising on the site.
— Mic King (@iPullRank) January 29, 2023
#3 FI_QURL_STAT_POWER: -0.1943768768
Factor is the number of URL impressions for the request
— Mic King (@iPullRank) January 29, 2023
#5 FI_GEO_CITY_URL_REGION_COUNTRY: -0.168645758
Factor is the geographical coincidence of the document and the country that the user searched from.
Ok, now for the top 5 positively weighted factors.
— Mic King (@iPullRank) January 29, 2023
Here is a starting point for link related factors.https://t.co/fwP8TxuOrM
— Christoph C. Cemper 🇺🇦 🧡 SEO (@cemper) January 30, 2023
Will this help you do SEO on Google? Probably not but hey, it is super interesting.
Ah, but once they find the optimal word count …
BOOM
— John Mueller is watching out for Google+ 🐀 (@JohnMu) January 29, 2023
Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.
SEARCHENGINES
Unconfirmed Google Update Impacting Product Reviews Sites On January 26th

On Thursday, January 26th, there were some signs of a possible Google search ranking algorithm update. The signals and chatter I was tracking, honestly, were not at super high levels. However, now that I see Glenn Gabe shared some really shocking charts of sites previously impacted by Google updates but now seeing a big swing. This is not necessarily a product reviews update but rather sites in the product reviews space that are seeing massive swings on the 26th.
Let me first share Glenn’s charts, which he posted on Twitter and said, “Heads-up, run a product reviews site? Google pushed something on 1/26 that, once again, impacted some product review sites HEAVILY. These are sites I’ve documented before with crazy surges/drops, even outside of Product Reviews Updates. Let’s see if this sticks. I hope it does.”
Here is that tweet:
Heads-up, run a product reviews site? Google pushed something on 1/26 that, once again, impacted some product review sites HEAVILY. These are sites I’ve documented before with crazy surges/drops, even outside of Product Reviews Updates. Let’s see if this sticks. I hope it does 🙂 pic.twitter.com/ZXa1r3xwcD
— Glenn Gabe (@glenngabe) January 29, 2023
Starting on the 25th, I began to see limited chatter kick into gear at WebmasterWorld. The chatter there was not specific to the product reviews update but it could have been related to it. Here are some quotes from there:
My site has been climbing rankings all week and yet today the traffic has been dismal (UK). Do I smell an update?
My ranks, as I said, have been getting better after being in decline steadily since this time last year. I haven’t done anything to improve. Could this mean that google are indeed looking at different ranking signals, not just links? I could have gained a link or two that has turned it around I suppose but no evidence so far.
After great improvement over the month of January, got a big bang down since January 24 onwards. Changes again?
Definitely, something is wrong with Google. My traffic is going down without any reason. Are there any delays with Analytics?
I don’t know what’s going on, but my website has been in free fall for a week now. And it’s the usual picture again, old news articles or meaningless keyword spam ranks in my area on the top places. It’s really no fun anymore …
Google Tracking Tools
Here are what the tracking tool are showing:
So the tools are not lighting up but this update may have been something tweaked with the product reviews update, or a new update impacting product review sites or limited to those segments of websites?
Have any of you seen any big changes around January 26th?
Forum discussion at Twitter.
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