Ever since I started reading more technical SEO blogs such as SEO by the Sea, SEO Theory and more I’ve been on a quest to find great SEO content.
And what better place to find huge amounts of quality SEO content than academia?
Some of these are from the last few years, some are as old as ’99. Some are very technical, some are more philosophical. So without further adieu here is the list (most are in PDF format)
The list
Probably the most generalized thesis out of all the papers listed here, but still very well done.
Year: 2012
School: California State University
A study on SEO with a consumer angle.
Year: 2013
School: University of Minnesota
WebCrawler: Finding What People Want
The cool thing about this one is that it was written by a guy named Brian Pinkerton who later went on to start his own agency and do great things.
Year: 2000
School: University of Washington
Detecting colluders in PageRank: Finding slow mixing states in a Markov chain (Removed, anyone have a new link?)
Very technical, have not read but perhaps Bill Slawski might be interested.
Year: 2005
School: Stanford University
Manipulation of PageRank and collective hidden Markov models
Kind of an examination of black hat techniques but again very technical and from an engineering and mathematical standpoint.
Year: 2010
School: Cornell University
The PageRank citation ranking: bringing order to the web
Year: 1999
School:Oregon State
Deception in Authorship Attribution
Very relevant and forward thinking thesis. Talks all about authorship attribution as a whole on the web.
Year: 2013
School: Drexel University
Contextualized web search: query-dependent ranking and social media search
More of a social media paper but very in-depth and technical.
Year: 2010
School: Georgia Institute of Technology
Modeling User Behavior and Attention in Search
Year: 2013
School: University of Washington
Google AdWords as a Network of Grey Surveillance
Year: 2010
School: Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University
Search Visibility and Online Social Presence for Bed and Breakfasts
I thought this one was really cool because it focuses on a specific niche. A savvy business owner could probably extract a comprehensive online business plan from this dissertation.
Year: 2012
School: University of Deleware
Identifying search engine spam using DNS
Year: 2011
School: Texas A&M University
Another niche focused dissertation. Focuses on smaller travel agencies in the European market and gives an overall strategy and approach for someone in this sector.
Year: 2011
School: Universitat Politecnica de Catalunya
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