As you would expect, SEOs are poring over the Google API documents leaked this weekend. See Rand Fishkin’s and Mike King’s posts for more info.
I thought it would be interesting to summarize all of the “Local SEO” relevant docs we can identify. I will be updating this post throughout the day as we find more.
This document defines a message format called GoogleApi.ContentWarehouse.V1.Model.QualityProductProductSiteDataLocaleData which represents data related to a specific locale (language) of a product site.
Here’s a breakdown of the information stored for each locale:
- boostFactor (number): A multiplier used to boost the ranking of the site in search results (higher value means higher boost).
- gobiSite (boolean): Indicates whether the site belongs to a specific domain (gobi) that should be boosted for relevant category searches.
- locale (string): The language associated with this data (e.g., “en” for English).
This document defines a data structure called GoogleApi.ContentWarehouse.V1.Model.GeostoreLocaleProto which represents a locale.
A locale is a geographic area with specific language and formatting preferences. Key points:
- A locale can have multiple languages.
- Locale is used to decide which language to use for a particular area.
- Political boundaries may not always align with language borders (e.g. California has Spanish speakers but Spanish is not an official language).
The data structure has the following attributes:
language: List of languages spoken within the locale (list of strings).localizationPolicyId: ID of the localization policy to apply (string).
This document defines a data structure called GoogleApi.ContentWarehouse.V1.Model.RepositoryWebrefGlobalLinkInfo which groups information about links for all locales of an entity.
The data structure has the following attributes:
debugTitle: Short human-readable name of the linked entity (string).isBoostedPrimaryWeightLink: Whether this is a boosted primary weight link (boolean).targetMid: Mid of the linked entity (string).variantInfo: Information about this link for each locale (list of `GoogleApi.ContentWarehouse.V1.Model.RepositoryWebrefLinkInfo.t).
This document defines a message format called GoogleApi.ContentWarehouse.V1.Model.QualityProductProductSiteData used to store information about product sites.
Key points:
- This data is related to product sites and likely used for internal systems (e.g., signals data).
- It stores information for each locale (language) of the product site.
- Each locale’s data is stored in a separate field using another message format called
GoogleApi.ContentWarehouse.V1.Model.QualityProductProductSiteDataLocaleData(which isn’t defined here).
This document defines a message format called GoogleApi.ContentWarehouse.V1.Model.GeostoreLocaleLanguageProto which describes details about a single language within a specific region (locale).
Here’s a breakdown of the information stored for each language:
- Language code: This refers to a standardized code that identifies the language (e.g., “en” for English).
- Official: Indicates whether the language is considered an official language within the locale.
- Preference: A value between 0 and 1 representing how preferred the language is within the locale (higher is more preferred).
- Speaking population: Percentage of the population within the locale that can speak the language (between 0 and 100).
- Writing population: Percentage of the population within the locale that can write the language (between 0 and 100).
