Ep. 18 - What’s Google Really Looking For? – SEO Secrets from a Leaked Internal Document

In this explosive episode of The Law Firm Growth Professor Podcast, I unpack a recent internal document leak from Google that reveals the search engine’s true ranking priorities - and what it actually takes to get your law firm noticed online.

Spoiler: It's not about chasing perfection or stuffing keywords. Drawing on ancient Greek philosophy and modern SEO science, I explains why writing for humans, not algorithms, is the only winning strategy. You’ll learn how Google’s 14,000+ ranking signals work (or don’t), what “E-E-A-T” really means, and why obsessing over page-one rankings might be hurting more than helping.

If you're tired of vague SEO advice and want a straight-shooting, ethical roadmap for growing your firm's online presence, this is your must-hear guide.

Highlights:
• What the Google leak really said—and why it matters
• How to avoid SEO traps that tank your rankings
• Why “trust” beats “traffic” every time
• 5 simple, timeless tactics to win with Google—ethically

Subscribe now to outsmart the algorithm and grow your law firm with integrity.

Want to learn more about how our agency can help your law firm grow? Speak with John Rizvi ☎️

Transcript

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This is Pod Populi, podcast for the people. Welcome back to the Law Firm Growth Professor Podcast. I'm John Risby, the Law Firm Growth Professor. If you're new to my podcast, it's good to have you. If you're tuning in again, I'm always glad to see you. Now in this podcast, I share the strategies for growth that have worked for me in growing my law firm from a startup with just me, a laptop, and a cell phone operating out of a spare bedroom to where we are today, a team of 60 professionals generating over 10 million a year in revenues from our 10,000 square foot headquarters in Coral Springs. Last week, I was reading on searchengine land.com about a huge internal Google document leak covering how Google's SEO algorithms work and what they're looking for. This is wild because we haven't had anything like this, this kind of clarity about how Google looks at SEO since mid-2000. It's also critical because it may tell marketers and their clients, including law firms, which signals are most important from Google's perspective. The documents, which were posted to GitHub on March 13th by an automated bot, are allegedly valid as of March. If they're legitimate, we have a sort of time capsule of what Google's priorities were at that time. From that, we can extrapolate what they're likely to be in the future and start to design our updated marketing strategies around this information. Now, before we get into the contents of the documents, there are some problems with this leak. First, the documents date back to March of 2025, so they're already several months out of date. Google's June update is being deployed web wide as we speak, and we have fairly little information about how the new update stacks up against the information in the documents. The numbers given in the new batch of leaked documents seem to line up against a leaked Google document from May 2024. So on that basis, we can feel reasonably confident that the information is good and legitimate. But don't get too relaxed just yet. Second, these documents may have been leaked improperly or even at Google's direction. Call me paranoid if you want, but Google has dangled red herrings before to keep its proprietary systems and processes secret. It's hardly the only search engine or social media platform to have done so. So we can't fully trust the validity of the information in a vacuum. And even if Google does validate the content of the leaked documents, there's nothing to stop them from saying, but it won't matter, because the June algorithm update makes all of this obsolete, or at best, suspect. So go ahead and roll the dice. But John, if we don't know the information's good, why would we act on it? Well, there's a very good reason to act on it. The information in this new batch of documents does line up with the May 2024 leak, at least enough to make it credible. This information can show us how Google's API or application programming interface has changed and evolved over time, which of course offers us clues as to how Google's algorithms may change in the future and gives us a chance to get out in front of these changes. However, we need to remember that AI is the wild card in this equation. Google's own AI overviews are skewing the results toward the information that Google chooses to promote. This throws the organic content and ranking out of whack, even though the organic rankings still exist. AI overviews bury the lead on organic search, putting the relevant information further down the page beyond where the average or casual user who's just out for a quick answer is likely to look. Still, at least for now, we're stuck with AI overviews, at least until the EU antitrust lawsuit against AI overviews is resolved, and we see how this translates in the real world and especially stateside. So for now we've got to work around them, but first we're gonna have to take a quick detour to ancient Greece, Athens specifically, somewhere between 428 BC and 347 BC. Now in this time frame, the Greek philosopher Plato came up with what today is known as a theory of forms, which says that there's a perfected form or idea for everything and concept in the world. As humans, Plato asserted, we are limited by our senses and perceptions, so we cannot ful uh truly understand concepts like truth, beauty, or justice, only our perception of them, which is by definition imperfect in nature. We see reflections of truth, beauty, and justice, but not the real thing. In the same way that Plato argued that in the realm of the gods there exists a perfected, concrete, tangible example of all of these concepts, as well as physical objects. If you're sitting on a chair right now, it's a chair. For as long as you occupy it, it's your chair. You may even think of it as the chair, but it's not the chair according to Plato, because the chair is the cheriest chair that could ever possibly exist. We can get close to a chair's ideal form, but never achieve it. So what, you're probably asking, why are you bending my ear about ancient Greek philosophy? And what does this have to do with SEO and marketing my law firm? That's a fair question. And my answer is because Google thinks its algorithms are forming the Platonic ideal of good content. But to understand why that phrase is going to pop up in this podcast, we need to revisit who Plato was and how this theory of forms intersects with your law firm's online marketing, which brings us back to how to figure out how to get around AI overviews. So we're going to go to the numbers from the June Google API leak. According to the March leak, Google's algorithms consist of 2,596 individual modules, comprising 14,014 attributes and signals. And we don't even know what most of them are or what they do. That's far too many signals for a human being or even a group of them to try to nail every time. And Google even doesn't want to. Here's a little cookbook, Back of the Napkin Math. If you want to look at it. Yeah, if you absolutely knew what every signal was and you worked only on polishing one piece of content to align with every single module and every single signal, eight hours a day, five days a week, and you succeeded, then you would spend six weeks getting just one piece of content ready to deploy. And that figure doesn't include the time actually involved in creating the initial piece. So if you're doing a time-sensitive piece, say commentary on a recent legal action that's popping up all over the news, there's no way that you're going to invest. It's six weeks of prep and polish to publish it. By the time you had it ready, you'd have completely missed the news cycle and fallen into the abyss of old news. Now that kind of time investment doesn't sound so bad if you're doing a long-form white paper on a complex legal topic where everything has to be accurate and as close to perfect as you can make it. In a situation like that, it might make sense to try and perfect and polish every possible signal so that you can capture the platonic ideal of good content as promoted by Google and maximize your ROI. The problem is that that type of uh obsessive effort will inevitably trigger alarms with Google because it would be too perfect. Google expects to see some flaws and hints of humanity, which means chasing perfection as defined by Plato and Google could end up uh being the same as shooting yourself and your firm in the foot. Instead, at the top level of the SEO spectrum, Google looks at a metric called EEAT or double EAT. It's a clunky acronym for experience, expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness. And it's the end all be all of how Google wants its users and advertisers to frame their material. So if we start with EEAT, which is basically another way of saying, worry about giving your audience what they're looking for and not just chasing rankings. The problem here is that page rankings are usually held up as the definitive gold standard to tell if your SEO strategy is even working. Page ranks are quick and easy for you to uh uh try to determine. They're obvious and in your face. They don't demand anything but a functioning pair of eyes and a brain, capable of counting to 10. You don't need to know how Google algorithms work to know your content is showing up at the top of organic search for a given search term and whether that's a good thing. So that's the metric most digital marketing agencies push, intentionally or not, because it saves them giving lengthy and tedious explanations their clients probably don't give half a damn about anyway. They see the result, the result is good, and they move on to the next. Wash, rinse, repeat. But when you realize that there are 2,600 modules and uh 14,000 signals that you're trying to hit, it makes the whole thing sound a lot more like a crapshoot. And that's another complication as well. By Google's own admission, they don't even know what good content looks like on the platonic level that they say they and their algorithms are aiming for. In quarter four of 2016, a slide deck created for an internal presentation at Google, which came to light during a US DOJ uh antitrust trial, said blatantly and bold, we do not understand documents, we fake it. The bullet proof points underneath read, today our ability to understand documents is directly uh minimal. So we watch how people react to documents and we memorize their responses. So, okay, this was nearly 10 years ago. Surely Google has evolved since then, right? Well, in many ways, yes, it has. But in a lot of ways, it's still outsourcing the understanding of good content to AI algorithms and Google's own users. Ironically, this doesn't stop them from identifying and in many cases penalizing made-for-search engine content. We know AI generated content, and content that's meant more for machines than humans gets penalized. It's been that way at least since the Penguin and Panda updates came on the scene. But if Google doesn't know good content, how can we trust we're delivering it? Thankfully, this part's simple. And so obvious that many marketers overlook it. We start with creating content written for the benefit of human beings, not to grab the attention of machines. This is something I've been passionate about since the beginning, but now we have confirmation from Google that this is the single most important metric. So everything has to begin and end with prioritizing viewers, which is to say our prospective clients, overchasing the rankings or hitting Google's platonic ideal of good content. Now we can start thinking about SEO, search terms, metadata, links, and so on. Taking these in order, then, we want to be thinking about search terms. Are they logical? Do they have the intended meaning in the mind of the visitor? User intent, as measured by Google from user search histories, is a key metric. So we need to be thinking not like attorneys or marketers in this space, but like clients. They're the main drivers. And if our keywords don't line up with user intent, we're dead in the water. Pivoting from here, we're looking at metadata. Does our site and page metadata line up with its intended purpose? Does it signal that the search term aligns with the result we're offering? Next, we move to links. Does the link we've installed to the page point where we mean to point it? Do the other links in the content take viewers where they expect and intend to land? Improper links are a major demoting factor in the latest algorithms. So if your personal injury link takes a visitor to a notice of judgment announcement on an estate planning matter, your site's probably been dinged for this already. Even worse is if your internal, uh outbound, and inbound links aren't relevant to your site or authority sites like news outlets. If your clients are looking for help with patents, it doesn't make any sense to link to a website that sells pastries unless your firm helped launch that business in some way or you helped the owners through a legal issue. In this case, sure, go ahead. But be very careful how you embed and present the link so the relevance is obvious to the viewer and thus to Google. While we're doing this, we need to constantly be aware of demoting factors. Since I brought it up, your domain name is huge and it needs to be an exact match and link on its own. Links not matching the target site or page is a big one, as I said before. And the domain link is one of the top factors. You want lots of links to and from diverse sites, but you also need the links to be relevant and timely to your content. If your page has an unusually high bounce rate or low time on page, Google's going to take notice and it's not going to be the kind you want because these behaviors indicate a high user dissatisfaction rate. Bad or irrelevant product reviews are going to hurt as well because Google doesn't want you to promote junk. Your location needs to be in line with your user intent as well. If you're a Houston law firm that's only licensed in Texas, having links targeting Florida may get your site demoted in rankings. And of course, you don't want pornographic content or outbound links on your site anywhere. So it's important to audit your links every so often, especially the ones in the comments. If you have your comments set to auto-approve, you need to turn this off immediately because Google can see the comments and where the links point if they're not relevant. And your site will take the hit. Sure, the site that spammed yours will get it too, but we're not worried about theirs, just yours. So, okay, uh, these will get your website demoted, and that's bad, but your change history can also help or hurt your rankings. If your page hasn't changed since 2019, it's likely going to get less love from Google than more current information. The law changes a lot, even when the political climate is more stable than it is right now, and your content needs to evolve either along with it to or stay relevant. Google keeps a record of every change your site has ever made, but it only considers the 20 most recent revisions or versions when it analyzes links for the purpose of evaluating page rank. One of the most surprising revelations is that longer form content can be cut off or truncated, and only the first X amount of words are considered. It gets an originality score from ranging from zero to 512, which is another great reason to be wary of using AI at all to assist in the content creation process. Most importantly, you need to focus on brand development and recognition in the real world first and foremost. People tend to click on brands that they know in Google search, even if that brand isn't necessarily the best solution to their problem. By boosting your name recognition, it gives you an instant edge in online spaces that all this SEO tricks in the world cannot match. With this in mind, let's recap. Your firm's real world brand is the important part. Your online presence is an important element of it, and I would never argue otherwise. But the online presence is mostly sizzle. If you don't put real stake on the plate for your clients, all the sizzle in the world won't help you. A brand that generates real positive results for the people who interact with it is worth more than any amount of marketing gimmicks and hacks. 2. Write for people, not machines. You'll never achieve the platonic left ideal of good content, and it's a bad idea to even try, because that could actually hurt you more than if you didn't bother with SEO at all. Keywords matter, sure, but they're a sideshow. People are the ones paying your firm's bills and salaries. So they're the part of the equation you need to focus on. Three, your content should always solve a problem or provide useful information. If you can do this in a way that's entertaining and a thought-provoking way that keeps the reader coming back for more, you're more than halfway to the finish line. Keep your content fresh and up to date. A big change can get you a big boost in the rankings, especially if you're the first on the line. Besides, changing up your content every so often shows Google you're not just chasing the next big thing. You're focused on content that stands the test of time, but also evolves in step with the law. Check your links and make sure they work as intended. If they point somewhere that they shouldn't, or they're not relevant to your firm's practice or brand, get rid of them and seek out links that align better with your intended purpose. Five things. Five relatively simple things that you can start doing today to boost your law firm's profile on Google without a lot of digging into metrics or trying to game 14,000 signals. Sounds good, right? It's not necessarily easy, but it's worth it. Once again, I'm John Risvie, the law firm growth professor. Thanks for stopping by. Now, before you leave, be sure to like, subscribe, and click the share button to pass this on to other attorneys that you think would benefit from a boost in their marketing. Oh, and if you ever have time, I'd love to hear uh your thoughts on how you prioritize these items in your own practice. What do you think is the most important aspect of online marketing and how do you put it into play for your clients? The door's open and I'm listening. Let's start a dialogue. Thanks for tuning in. So when a new idea pops into your brain, call the patent professor. That's my name. I'm a law school professor. An engineer too. I think math is fun and patents are cool. If the patent office says your idea is not new, that's just red tape that will cut right through. So when a new idea pops into your brain, call the patent professor. That's my name.