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)
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
They are very interesting. Don’t let the math within them dissuade you from reading more – often most papers can be understood to a large degree in spite of the math.
When I find a paper I really like, I’ll often dig through it’s citations and check out some of those, too. 🙂
Bad memories from high school math I suppose :/ No for sure, I always try to “press through” any info I don’t fully understand and either go past it or figure it out later. A good friend of mine studied math in college and we talked for a long time about PageRank and such, I’ve always found it fascinating even the parts that I haven’t learned. Even the vocab used within these papers are so advanced compared to the blogs I read or even most books! Also if you come across any more good ones let me know!
I noticed my vocabulary increased dramatically after starting to read Scientific American on a regular basis. I was interested in the material enough so that I was learning the words it was presented in.
Blogging about patents means spending every day reading some challenging material, and trying to put it into simpler words, which I take as a personal improvement opportunity. If I can do that consistently for blog posts, I can also do it for clients. It’s a little like a workout for your mind. 🙂
That makes sense – yes the patents look even crazier! You have mathematics, law, theory, philosophy and all sorts of other stuff rolled up into one!
Hi Patrick,
You’ve found and listed some very interesting academic papers – including at least one that everyone doing SEO should have read. I’m definitely going to be bookmarking this page and returning to it.
OK, titles like “Deception in Authorship Attribution” could be a pool-side mystery novel, but I’m looking forward to the plot twist, or at least to what the author might cite that makes authorship flawed.
My summer reading so far includes Ray Kurzweil’s “How to Create a Mind,” and oddly enough hidden Markov models play a role in that one – it will be interesting seeing what “Manipulation of PageRank and collective hidden Markov models” has to say about them.
Thanks.
Bill
Well I’ve skimmed maybe 3-4 of these and haven’t even made it through one of them yet! The reason I thought they were cool is because they are so well researched and cited and not just a blabbermouth SEO blogger like me 🙂 Its very humbling for me reading this in the fact I’ve been doing web development more than half my life and a lot of this is so foreign, particularly the mathematical concepts.
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