Search Engine Technology Bookmarks

Here are some bookmarks to get you thinking about SEO from a highly advanced and technical point of view. Not all of this stuff is comprehensible by those without a background in Information Retrieval but be patient, re-read, re-read and re-read again until you understand as much as you can. Once you begin to understand the concepts you thought were impossible for you to understand before, you will not only be a better SEO but you will be able to better distinguish who out there actually knows what they're talking about.

Of course, this is not a complete list. There are so many good articles out there, many of which can be found by following the links in these articles. So get your research on and, if you feel like it, please let me know about any articles you find or already know of that should be on this list.

Essential Reading

• The Quest for Correct Information on the Web: Hyper Search Engines
• Anatomy of a Large-scale Hypertextual Search Engine
• The PageRank Citation Ranking: Bringing Order to the Web
• Authoritative sources in a hyperlinked environment
• Hilltop: A Search Engine based on Expert Documents
• Filthy Linking Rich And Getting Richer!
• Searching With Invisible Tabs
• Shaping the Web: Why the Politics of Search Engines Matter
• As We May Think by Vannevar Bush
• Google Branding by Aaron Wall
• Google Rater Guidelines

Information Retrieval (IR) - Crawling and Indexing the Web

• Efficient Crawling Through URL Ordering
• Crawling the Web: Discovery and Maintenance of Large Scale Web Data
• Modern Information Retrieval: A Brief Overview
• Text Retrieval Quality: A Primer
• ACM SIGIR: Information Retrieval Special Interest Group
• Text Retrieval Conference (TREC)

Natural Language Processing (NLP) - Determining Relevance and Word Patterns

• Patterns in Unstructured Data
• Keywords Co-occurrence and Semantic Connectivity
• Latent Semantic Analysis (LSA)
• Probabilistic Latent Semantic Analysis (PLSA)
• Latent Dirichlet allocation
• Hidden Topic Markov Models
• LSI and Google
• GoRank Ontology Tool

Link Analysis - Ranking the Web

• The PageRank Citation Ranking: Bringing Order to the Web
• Authoritative sources in a hyperlinked environment
• Filthy Linking Rich And Getting Richer!
• Google Patent: Method for node ranking in a linked database
• Google TrustRank Whitepaper
• Topic-Sensitive PageRank
• BrowseRank - Microsoft tries to one-up Google PageRank
• Google: TrustRank, much ado about nothing?
• Hubs, Authorities, and Communities
• SpamRank - Fully Automatic Link Spam Detection
• Impact Of Search Engines On Page Popularity
• A New Paradigm For Ranking Web Pages On The World Wide Web
• PageRank Calculator

Web Spam, Spamdexing, and Link Spamming

• Web Spam Taxonomy
• The Classification of Search Engine Spam
• Cloaking and Redirection: A Preliminary Study
• Web Spam, Propaganda and Trust