Every confirmed update since 2003, the ranking machinery behind the results, and every claim graded by its evidence. Written by James Burfield.
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External links need someone else’s permission. Internal links are yours: which pages get authority, which get found, and what Google’s told each page is about, all…
Crawl budget is real, documented and almost certainly irrelevant to your site. Google’s own guidance aims it at sites with over a million pages, or hundreds…
AI Overviews are the generated summaries that sit above results for a growing share of queries. They changed the economics of ranking: you can hold position…
EEAT is Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness and Trust: the framework Google’s quality raters use to judge whether a page deserves to be believed. It gets talked about…
Recovery advice is where SEO gets least honest, because the truth is unsellable: it’s slow, the work is unglamorous, and no one outside Google can promise…
The helpful content system is the most consequential ranking system Google has shipped this decade, and it no longer exists as a separate thing. It launched…
A core update is a broad change to Google’s main ranking systems. Google announces them, names them (March 2026 core update, and so on), and posts…
YMYL stands for Your Money or Your Life. It’s the label Google’s quality rater guidelines give to topics where a bad answer can genuinely hurt someone:…
Before a page can rank, it has to get into the index. More pages fail at that step than most site owners realise, and the failure…
Type a query, get results in under a second. Between those two moments sits a system Google has spent 25 years building, and most SEO confusion…