I'm not going to quote or link to the post, but I just left this comment. I'll add something to it at the end.
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You're not going to learn what the search algorithms are doing from the API documentation. You're not going to learn what the ranking signals are from the API documentation. That's a fairy tale cooked up by people who obviously don't understand just how ubiquitous APIs have become in the development world. They are used to move data between clients and files (usually both ways where protocol buffers are concerned).
You got some interesting names and acronyms from the APIs. That's cool and fun to play with. But no one learned anything about how Google collects and processes this data, or where the data was used, when it was used, what they hoped to accomplish from using it, or what the results were.
All this "algorithm" stuff is just nonsense and you will lead a much improved life if you just walk away from these fairy tales before you do something really stupid with a Website people's livelihoods depend on.
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The people who think the API documents have spilled the guts of Google's algorithm and proven that Googlers have been lying to you for years created a clown show that - for now - simply embarrasses the entire search engine optimization world.
It's when the new tools and tool features start rolling out, and when the new "SEO secrets to success" courses that incorporate the nonsense the SEO community have been telling each other, that the real damage will be done.
Frankly, I don't care if you people nuke your own Websites with this stupidity. If you insist on being THAT gullible you deserve to waste your time, energy, and money on ridiculous fairy tale optimization.
But those of you who are selling your services or doing full-time work as in-house SEOs - these aren't just YOUR livelihoods you're risking on your fantasies and bullshit misinterpretations. You're putting OTHER people's livelihoods at risk.
The SEO community has done this before. You guys just latch on to some get-traffic-quick scheme and roll with it until the crap in the search results becomes so intolerable the search engines are forced to take drastic action. That's happened time and again since Black Monday in 1998.
Obviously most of you are never going to learn to check your dreams and egos at the door. You're going to continue cooking up nonsense theories and backslapping each other over your ridiculous guesses at how large software systems work.
Your magical thinking makes you feel good but I look back at all the times small businesses - and sometimes big enterprises - had to scramble to uncook the disasters created by SEO specialists who followed a "theory" or accepted as verified fact some nonsense that clearly contradicted what the search engineers told us.
Learn from this - not what you wish for - but what you need to learn. Do better.