How to find real science for building better sites

[goodroi]

There are a bunch of talking SEO pundits that spout their personal guesses and pass them off as real science. these guesses are too often bad advice bouncing around the SEO echo chamber. So how does someone find real scientific data?

You can use Google Scholar to search actual research papers & patents. I suggest you limit it to research no more than 2 or 3 years old since the internet landscape changes so much.
Google Scholar results for SEO [scholar.google.com]
Google Scholar results for Website Design [scholar.google.com]

You can also use [sci-hub.cc...] to search and gain access to these scientific papers.

Happy researching!

[NickMNS]

It is impossible to use "science" for SEO, as SEO is simply an attempt to backwards engineer a portion of the Google search algorithm. If ever one would be successful Google would immediately be required to make changes. Not to mention that the algo is changing constantly regardless.

Can we use science to make a better website? Yes absolutely, in terms of better content, better usability and better programming. But not for SEO.

SEO is a pseudo science at best. Pure witch craft!

[aristotle]

If some person or group had the time and the resources, and conducted carefully thoughtout studies, they could determine some of the characteristics of the sites that tend to do well in google's search results. This would be the true scientific approach. In principle it would be no different than scientific research in biology, physics, etc.

[NickMNS]

@aristotle it would be fundamentally different, in the natural sciences and even in the social sciences your are studying a process that is out of the control of any one person or group of people, for all intents and purposes the process cannot be manipulated or changed. When it comes to Google, you are studying a process that is controlled by a few people, it can be (and is) changed (frequently).

[tangor]

Human behavior is a science. It is not perfectly understood and the rules are amorphous, but it does exist ... and is nothing new, goes back to the 1800s as a study but has existed for centuries as a human social construct.

All artificial intelligence applications are human based, they are after all, created by humans for human purposes. Only if Colossus achieves sentience will that change.

[NickMNS]

Human behavior is a science.

Yes, but studying an algo that is constantly changing as a result of human behavior will provide results on the human behavior not the algo.

[tangor]

Reverse that statement and I will agree. :)

The "algo" is a human behavior to drive more income to the creator of the algo. The result is other human behavior to beat the algo. Each of the farm yard animals has been to define and refine the web to g's liking, not ours. Any Freds seem to be tightening those changes down. This puts the algos into not only human behavior, but general economics as well, and add to that the concepts of scale and micro transactions to achieve immense results.

The USER, as defined by g, doesn't like some forms of publishing and that results in less ad revenue. There's also a controlled theft of content which bypasses creators, also an algo. The result, ignore (or not rank) the unliked sites and max the liked sites. If g can keep the user satisfied ON THEIR SITE, the ad dollars are not shared, hence more for g.

What startles me is that so many webmasters continue to do the same things over and over expecting a different result. The magic days at the turn of the century are not going to be repeated... g no longer has to "give incentive" for their money machine to work. That initial giveaway (sharing wealth to create "gold in them thar hills") accomplished its goal and g now has a captive, immense, clamorous audience of publishers they can pick and chose for rewards (which pay less now than ever before).

And they do, claiming USER satisfaction guiding their activities.

I've got a bridge for sale, make me an offer.

Any attempt to game g's algo will eventually be met with a g response ... and each one of those has been more draconian than the previous.

There are no special sciences involved in what we do, nor are the sciences in use any more special or wonderful than any other sciences. What we do have, in some cases, is a self-destructive blindness, or belief, in g's methods. Contrary to some assertions, g has only g's self-interest at heart. As long as webmasters play their game g is not motivated to change and that's the science of that.

SEO once worked magically and instantly. Not so these days as those initial vectors of change have been tamed and in some cases completely neutered.

Not a rant, just recognizing the world as it is and having already undertaken other paths which pay better (the work is harder) than the status quo of the Adsense/Adwords method.