The Google Search Liaison, Danny Sullivan, gave a more specific comment to specific signals and elements mentioned in the search leak, well above and beyond what is mentioned in the original and very vague comment gave us a couple days after the Google search leak. Sullivan responded to questions on Navboost, clicks and user interactions as it related to the Helpful content update and the search leak.

Sullivan said on X, “The reality is we use a variety of different ranking signals including, but not solely, “aggregated and anonymized interaction data” as covered here.”

Yes, that document does read:

Here is a screenshot – that is what the document said since 2019 or so (I am told but the Wayback machine only has it from August 2021):

This is something Sullivan commented on back with the DOJ documents and when Navboost came out, that we covered here in November. Then Sullivan wrote, “It was along the lines of of course we use user interaction signals, and it says this on the How Search Works site, plus it says this in your 2019 article when you asked us.”

Sullivan added, “Which leads to not the “do you use them” but “how do you use them” which I said we won’t go into the specific because what would you do? And that like anything, it would then cause people to focus on specific things rather than the board goals.” He said that “the longer part of what I talked about, and which I’ll likely share more about, on how we at Google need to do a better job to ensure that when we explain about broad things people should consider, that we help them not get lost in the specifics.”

Now back to the question posted this morning, Katie Caf Travel posted “If the HCU (Navboost, whatever you want to call it) is clicks/user reaction based – how could sites hit by the HCU ever hope to recover if we’re no longer being served to Google readers? @sundarpichai “Users vote with their feet”, Okay I’ve changed my whole site – let them vote!”

Sullivan replied, “If you think further about this type of belief, no one would ever rank in the first place if that were supposedly all that matters — because how would a new site (including your site, which would have been new at one point) ever been seen? The reality is we use a variety of different ranking signals including, but not solely, “aggregated and anonymized interaction data” as covered here.”

She then asked, “Can you please tell me if I’m doing right by focusing on my site and content – writing new articles to be found through search – or if I should be focusing on some off-site effort related to building a readership? It’s frustrating to see traffic go down the more effort I put in.”

He went longer on the next reply:

Here are those posts:

Forum discussion at X.