Evergreen guides to how Google actually works and what to do about it. Each one is built to stay right: how search crawls, indexes and ranks, what a core update is and how to recover from one, and how E-E-A-T and the helpful content system really factor in.Start with how Google Search works for the foundation, then the ranking systems pillar for the machinery underneath. Where a claim rests on real testing, we link straight to the research library, and every term has a short definition in Learn.
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 decided by you, changeable this afternoon, free. For most sites they’re the highest-return work available, and they’re usually a mess. Why internal links move rankings Three mechanisms, all documented … Read more
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 like a ranking factor you can switch on, and that framing causes most of the bad advice around it. Here’s what it is, how it reaches your rankings, and … Read more
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 1 and still lose a third of your clicks. This page tracks what the data shows, and because that data moves fast, every claim carries a date. Last full … Read more
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 of thousands of pages that change daily. I’m writing this guide as much to tell you when to close the tab as to explain the mechanics. The 2 dials: … Read more
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 rollout start and end dates on its status dashboard. They happen 2 or 3 times a year now, each rollout takes days to weeks, and they’re the updates most … Read more
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 in August 2022, caused carnage in September 2023, and was folded into the core ranking systems in March 2024. Understanding that arc explains a lot about how Google treats … Read more
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 it’ll work. This guide is what I’d tell a friend, with the uncomfortable parts left in. Step 0: prove the update did it Before any recovery work, confirm causation … Read more
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 starts with guessing at how it works. So I’ll skip the guessing. Every claim in this guide is checked against Google’s own documentation, and I’ll say so when something … Read more
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 is usually silent: no error, no warning, just a page that never shows up. This guide covers the whole journey, discovery through indexing, the 3 controls you have over … Read more
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: their health, their finances, their safety, or their ability to participate in society. Pages on these topics get judged against a harsher standard than everything else, and if you … Read more