A Negative Proof for the Existence of Seed Sites for Google's Ranking System – David Vesterlund

This study investigates alternative models to seed site-based indexing for web crawling and ranking, including: (1) Full graph crawling without seeds, (2) User signals, (3) Manual trust assignment, and (4) Heuristic NLP-based models. Each model is evaluated against patent evidence, Google documentation, and recent legal disclosures. Findings indicate that all alternatives are either impractical or unsupported, while seed sites emerge as the most resource-efficient and well documented solution for efficient web crawling and ranking.

This work builds upon public disclosures and testimony from United States et al. v. Google LLC (2023–2025) and the Hobo Strategic SEO 2025 report.

New court evidence from United States et al. v. Google LLC (2023–2025) reveals that Google engineers, under oath, confirmed the use of seed sites as part of the modern Quality (Q*) metric for link trust evaluation. The DOJ Remedial Opinion explicitly references TrustRank, as a modern development of PageRank (distance from seed sites) as a key input to Google’s Quality Score, corroborated by the Hobo: Strategic SEO 2025 analysis (Anderson, 2025), which quotes internal court testimony confirming this model.
This study therefore concludes with a negative proof: if all non-seed models are unworkable and seed-based methods are directly evidenced in both patents and testimony, then seed sites must exist as the only viable architecture for large-scale, quality-weighted indexing.