One of my favourite sites, Search Engine Journal has put together a brilliant list of the blogs and sites you should pay attention to if you want to really understand SEO.
One of the weirder ones is Bill Slawski’s SEO By The Sea, where he covers what the search engines try to protect by way of patents. If you are in any way techy, grab yourself a large latte and get stuck in.
There is also Aaron Wall’s SEO Book, something that every respectful SEOer should be reading and taking notice of, as well as the die-hards like SEO Moz and Search Engine Land.
There’s also mention of a few forums worth checking out such as Webmaster World.
And just to show there’s no bias, SEO Black Hat is also included.
Anyway, sign up to the newsletters and keep abreast of the changes going on every day in SEO Land.
http://www.searchenginejournal.com/free-seo-resources/15336/
Update August 2013
A new book has just been launched that goes into incredible detail on Google’s patent and all things SEO. This is a must read if you really want the best insight into the algorithm and current thinking. It’s available on the Google Store.
Update August 2014
Very little has changed.
David Naylor’s article has quite a lot to say about it.
Update November 2015
Google’s Knowledge Graph (see this) is all about semantic indexing, which helps level the playing out there (read more about Google’s Hummingbird update which made this a permanent part of search).
However, backlinks still matter. The net is a connected place, and since search engines understand the nature and pattern of good connections (and bad ones!) it still realises that backlinks matter. How many there are and from different domains as well as content relevance is still the single most important way to rank pages.
If you want to leant more about this, join me in TheNumberOneClub.com
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