The Basics: SEO 101 Overviews
These are the only sources that provide direct information on how Google’s algorithms work:
- Google Search Central:
- Formerly “Webmasters,” this is the ultimate hub. It hosts the SEO Starter Guide, which covers the bedrock of crawling, indexing, and serving.
- Google Search Essentials:
- (Formerly Webmaster Guidelines) These are the “laws” of Google. If you violate these (e.g., spamming or sneaky redirects), your site can be de-indexed.
- Search Console Training (YouTube):
- A video series hosted by Google employees like Daniel Waisberg. It’s excellent for learning how to use Google Search Console to track your rankings and fix technical errors.
- Google’s “How Search Works”: A more visual, high-level guide that explains the philosophy behind their ranking systems.
The Google SEO Documentation
To master SEO in 2026, you need to understand the “invisible” layer of search: the policies that keep the web clean and the AI models that interpret your content.
AI & Spam Policy Guides (The Safety Net)
Google’s stance on AI has evolved. They no longer care if AI wrote your content, but they care deeply about why it was written.
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AI Policy Guide: Google rewards “People-First Content.” If you use AI to create helpful, original information, you’re safe. If you use it to mass-produce 1,000 low-quality pages to “flood” the search results, you will be penalized.
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Spam Policy Guide: This covers the “thou shalt nots.”
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Scaled Content Abuse: Using automation (AI or otherwise) to create large amounts of unoriginal content.
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Site Reputation Abuse: “Parasite SEO”—where a high-authority site (like a news outlet) hosts low-quality third-party content (like casino reviews) just to rank.
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Expired Domain Abuse: Buying an old, trusted domain name and filling it with unrelated junk to ride its former authority.
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3. What is a Crawler/Bot?
Before a page can rank, Google has to “see” it.
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The Bot: Googlebot is the name of the software (the “crawler” or “spider”).
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The Process: 1. Crawling: Googlebot follows links from one page to another like a digital explorer.
2. Rendering: Googlebot “paints” the page using a Chrome-based engine to see exactly what a user sees (including images and JavaScript).
3. Indexing: The information is filed away in a massive database (the Index).
4. Google BERT (The Brain)
BERT (Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers) was a revolutionary AI update that changed how Google understands “natural language.”
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Before BERT: Google looked at keywords. If you searched for “2019 brazil traveler to usa visa,” Google might have focused on “brazil” and “usa” but ignored the word “to.”
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With BERT: Google understands context. It knows “to” signifies a traveler moving from Brazil to the USA, ensuring the search results aren’t about US citizens traveling to Brazil.
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SEO Impact: You don’t need to write in “keyword-ese” anymore. Write like a human, and BERT will understand the intent.
5. Other Google Policy Guides
Beyond the basics, several other “handbooks” dictate your visibility:
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Merchant Center Policies: If you sell products, these govern how your items appear in the “Shopping” tab.
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Legal & Removal Policies: Guides on how Google handles copyright (DMCA) and requests to remove personal information (Right to be Forgotten).
