The very first public version of Google, run from a haphazard stack of PCs in the founders' dorm rooms, was — to put it mildly – very primitive. It was only in subsequent years, well after their initial success and massive funding, that the post-ranking component of Google became nearly predominant … [Read more...]

From the outside looking in, search engines appear very simple: you find a page you compare it to other pages and you pick a winner. That naïve you is just about as far away from reality as you could possibly get. Ranking is only part of the operation of a search engine. In fact, for Google today, … [Read more...]

It should be pretty obvious, I hope, that for a page to get ranked, Google first has to know about it! It's not like someone sends them a memo. :) Discovering pages and pre-processing them prior to the actual ranking process is part of what is called spidering or crawling. These will be described … [Read more...]

Here I will introduce at a very high level all of the steps that are required to get on Google search results from the moment you press publish on the webpage. It is a far more complex and interwoven process than even most experienced SEO's understand. The lessons in this chapter serve as … [Read more...]