Previous tests within the SEO community, including the SIA, have found that Google Slides do have some valuable link power and are great easy T1 links when not abused.
However, there have been tons of software and training put out that talk about how to create these “Google Stacks” and Google has since stopped allowing for a ‘Public’ link in its shared document options.
This is Phase 3 of the test to check if Google Slides still have ranking value, despite the non-public link.
Transcription below:
Clint: Okay, so if you've watched the last 3 months that I've done all these tests, ad nauseum. And what we're trying to do is give the Google documents or Google Drive documents stuff a fair shake, before we said that they were dead.
And frankly, there's a lot of people that build entire business models around these things, and they're still selling, etc. And there are people spending a lot of money doing them. And the course of this, what we did was test the available with available to the web, and we tested publish to the web. And I can actually show this because it's not going to hurt anything. That's blown up.
We have these folders, yes, it is a folder. And what we're looking at is right here versus anyone with the link can edit. And this is new. So under the new you create a new document right now, when you say public to the web, was published to the web, or any with the link that this is the one you get, this is the default, anyone that's like, publish it. versus if you go to an older one, you can see that, I have older one. I got another one in here. This is my old over-the-top SEO ones, I can probably share this one. At least to you guys.
Dori: Yay, we get to see the inner workings of Clint.
Clint: See, trying to see if I have one set properly. Alright, let's show you mine. So this is the old one. So if you didn't notice that it says public on the web, anyone on the internet can find it. So that's the change. So if you make a new one, a new Google Drive, and you make new public folders, this is the look you get.
If you look at the old ones, this is the lucky get. All of these are still indexed. And they're all still ranking there. As far as I know, I haven't tested specifically yet this kind of brings us back to the original tests are still passing link juice. But I can tell you right now that if your folder and your documents say that, they're not, they're not passing link juice, and they're not indexing, and you are wasting your money-making. So that's kind of where these tests go.
So there's tests we did, I did Google drawings. And as you can see nothing, I actually had to break into the site parameters to get it, it kind of went up and the site looks, but that really doesn't do anything if it's not in the top 100. Or the exact match. Let's see, same here, this one is Google Sheets. This is the one I really kind of hope would work and exact match. Not even there's nothing in there.
Those actually went up with some backlinks. But at the end of the day, again, it's an exact match for the search. And they're not even there at the backlinks that ranked higher than anything else, right. And these pages aren't even on that list.
Google Documents, this one was SIA tested before the Google Docs we're sending all kinds of link juice you can do to hold a lot of good time stuff with these things. Here's the public and you've seen that set up before exact match search not even there and do it this way. And those were actually even dropping even more.
The mind maps, this one I actually went full-on x rumor, GSA, I think I built over 30,000 links to this thing. So and then once you look here, this one actually showed up right? but it's not ranking higher than the rest of them. So if anything, it's kind of a wash year. It didn't fry it, but it didn't rank it either. So it's just the pages made, so I'm calling on this end. And I've actually run all these through Marco, here's Google Slides to let me finish showing these before we get there.
Google Slides, exact match, that one jumped up. So the relevancy of what I think happened is relevant, the past few the links, and I said, This page is more relevant.
Using this exact match than the rest of those, but it's still not worthy to rank, is kind of what I got out of that. And I talked to Marco Benavidez, he was on here before, he talked about ROS stacks, etc. And he's going to retest, looking at the difference, because he has admittedly, he's never tested, whether those are passing juice anymore. He hasn't done it in quite some time. And we can explain like the power of his ROS stacks was coming from the G sites where I think it is, or is it coming from Google Drive. And they have a trick that actually makes this public.
So basically, what you do is you make a new folder, you're going to get this view, and then you drag that folder into here, and then it will automatically switch those folders over. The downside of doing that is that it's stuck, you got to leave it in here, or move it to a completely different account in order to keep it. You can't move it in here, get that and then move it back out. It'll switch automatically, right back to this again, you have to actually transfer the whole folder over.
Dori: That's assuming that you have a folder with the old setup in it.
Clint: Yeah, that's assuming that you have. If you're using stacks, who stacksIO uses the API, if you're using stacks to make these folders, what I've noticed is that stacksIO because it's publishing everything including the folders to the API, they all show up like this. So there's still some light at the end of the tunnel if you're using stacksIO
Dori: But they show up the good way. That anyone can do.
Clint: Yeah, they showed a good way. I think because they're publishing the API, right? They haven't updated the API to match what they did, if you're doing it manually, is at the end of the day is what's happening. Like, catch up? I'm not sure but for right now, those are the two workarounds.
I've talked to Marco and talking to you guys. And I can tell you right now if you have this, they're not passing link juice from backlinks sent to them. And they're not passing any of the power and authority that we're used to from Google Drive anymore. These are a waste of time, you are using these as a link-building asset now.
The two tests that we have to do, that I have to do is testing this folder to verify that these are still passing link juice. And Marco is going to double down and test that as well. And then we are going to also test if they are set like this. And we embed them on another site, can we get some power from it? So let's say the money site is SIA test stuff. And I embed these on an Amazon s3 HTML-only page, will those documents count as links?
We have to test those two perspectives from Google Docs. But right now, if you are buying these, you have received these from suppliers, and they have this. I'm sorry to tell you, you're wasting your money. So it sucks. I know these are my favorite link-building things but now they're dead. Unless you know that this and most people don't know that so you guys are ahead of the curve.