Mark Williams-Cook gave an unbelievable presentation at SearchNorwich named Improving your SEO with conceptual models. Lucky for you and me, this presentation was posted on YouTube for us all to enjoy. It covers how Mark found an exploit in Google's end points and was able to extrapolate from that interesting data that aligns with the search API leak from earlier this year.
Danny Goodwin already wrote this up on Search Engine Land and I included the video and this article in my newsletter days ago, but it is really worth calling out in a story here.
In this presentation, Mark goes through signals such as site quality scores, YMYL flags, consensus flags, click age probability, short facts, bool, and so much more. He gained access to 2TB of data based on 90M queries, resulting in a large dataset of over 2,000 properties used by Google to classify queries and sites.
Aleyda Solis posted a really great recap of this on X, click through to read it all:
A must watch video presentation from @thetafferboy about Conceptual Models of SEO and Google Exploits, sharing what he and his team discovered through a Google endpoint:
— Aleyda Solis 🕊️ (@aleyda) December 15, 2024
* By manipulating network requests, the team was able to translate the data into plain text, resulting in a… pic.twitter.com/7EzV2RfaDl
Glenn Gabe also posted:
This is so good. I highly recommend watching @thetafferboy's presentation. Mark and his team found a Google endpoint and was paid $13K+ for reporting the vulnerability. But in true SEO fashion, they first received 2TB of data based on 90M queries, and identified 2,314 properties… pic.twitter.com/rcFDKARNAl
— Glenn Gabe (@glenngabe) December 16, 2024
Lily Ray:
- calling out the fake authors on LinkedIn pulse and framing it as another example of Site Reputation Abuse 😏
— Lily Ray 😏 (@lilyraynyc) December 16, 2024
- Google's endpoints for "consensus" and how Google can determine whether content attempts to debunk consensus (some of us have spoken about that for quite a while,…
At SearchNorwich, @thetafferboy gave a session called "Improving your SEO with conceptual models". This session discusses a Google end-point that Mark discovered that let to him analyzing 2,300+ Google properties and potential algorithm factors.
— Chris Long (@gofishchris) December 17, 2024
This is extremely similar to…
And so many more.
This video is worth watching fully.
Forum discussion at X.
