The word partenaires on this address is older than this magazine, so it earns a precise definition: these are our reading partners — the publications and documentation sets we rely on. Nothing here is paid, swapped or asked for; if a source stops being good, it leaves this page without ceremony.

Documentation we trust first

  • Google Search Central (developers.google.com/search) — the primary source for how the dominant engine crawls, renders and indexes. Read the documentation, not the rumours about it.
  • Bing Webmaster Tools docs (bing.com/webmasters) — the second engine’s own guidance, undervalued and frequently more candid.
  • MDN Web Docs (developer.mozilla.org) — when a technical SEO question is really a web-platform question, which is often.
  • W3C & WHATWG (w3.org, whatwg.org) — the specifications behind canonical hints, link semantics and structured data vocabularies.

Measurement and standards

  • Web analytics foundations — whichever tool you use, read its own methodology page before believing its referrer column; the decline of referrer data is itself a measurement story.
  • Schema.org (schema.org) — the shared vocabulary that makes pages legible to machines; see our note on AI surfaces for why legibility now pays three ways.

Trade press and field voices

A short, honest list: publications that cover search engine behaviour with named sources and corrections policies, and a handful of practitioner blogs that publish their own data. We deliberately keep this list short — five excellent sources beat fifty mediocre ones, and part of editorial discipline is refusing list inflation. The UK desk keeps its own regional shortlist on its partners page.

Peer sites we exchange reading with

Two paragraphs of context for the international reader: this magazine reads across the whole discipline — engineering, editing, measurement — and treats neighbouring crafts as adjacent rather than competitive. A publication that explains analytics better than we will is linked from our pages without ceremony, and we expect the same economy in return. The web’s original design was citation; a magazine about traffic that hoarded links would be a satire of itself.

Where a peer publication covers a neighbouring beat — analytics engineering, email craft, web performance — we link to them from our journal notes when their work is the better source. That is the extent of our “partnership programme”, and it is deliberately un-monetisable.

How a source earns a place here

Four tests, applied without sentiment. Primary over secondary: we list the documentation, not the commentary about it; commentary earns a place only when it adds original observation. Corrected over confident: a source that publishes corrections keeps its place over one that has never been wrong because it has never been specific. Durable over fresh: pages that keep their addresses and their meaning beat pages that redesign their URLs every season. Unbuyable over generous: the moment a listing here could be purchased, this page becomes an advert and the magazine becomes something else. The quarterly re-read is short; the discipline is not.

One meta-note for readers building their own lists: resist the temptation to list everything good. A reading list of two hundred sources is a bookmark graveyard. Ours holds entries you could read in a morning and re-read in a year — that is the target, and it is deliberately hard to hit.

A note on link requests

We decline guest-post swaps, link exchanges and “sponsored resource” placements by default — not out of rudeness, but because the value of this page is that it cannot be bought. If your documentation or dataset is genuinely excellent, it will make the list on merit, the same way everything else here did. Editorial contact details are on the about page.