Understanding how search engines work, Google in particular, is important when working in SEO. The basics of crawling and indexing are amazingly useful to understand if you want to rank your own content.
Additionally, Google updates its algorithm several times a year. Understanding the more significant updates, and how they work, can help you to craft content and SEO strategies that are up-to-date.
We've written extensively about how search engines work, and included some of the top resources here. You can also browse the latest posts on search engines from the Moz blog below.
How Search Engines Work : New to SEO? Start with the basics of how search engines operate with our free beginner's guide.
Search Engine Ranking and Visibility : Learn the fundamentals of how search engines rank content on search engine result pages.
Google Algorithm Update History : A complete history of Google algorithm updates since 2000. This includes important links and references for understanding how Google works.
How Search Engines Value Links : Search engines work off a number of signals, but two of the most important are content and links. In this video, Rand Fishkin explains the basics of link evaluation.
MozCast : Is Google updating it's algorithm as we speak? MozCast is the Google algorithm weather report, so you can see how much Google results are changing each day.
A weird thing has happened as a result of panda. Something you might have expected Google's Search Quality testers to catch before rolling the update out. Due to the domain-wide nature of the signal, high-quality, original content produced by the websites who were negatively impacted are now being ranked below the exact same content, republished by partners to whom they syndicate. Eve...
Competition breeds our biggest and brightest ideas, an example being the battle between Google and Facebook. As of this morning, Google has stepped up its efforts to provide current and relevant search results by refining its "Social Search." Going forward, social search result...
Since last December's admission from Google + Bing's search teams regarding the direct impact of Twitter + Facebook on search rankings, marketers have been asking two questions: What signals are Google + Bing counting? How much influence do these social signals have...
How did an entire SEO industry not see Google Panda coming? Google told you so...
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It's been a year, one calendar year since I joined Distilled. My first task was to write the post for SEOmoz as the rest of the office was going to be out on holiday. (Hi guys, bye guys ...) So I geared up to write my first blog post on SEOmoz, as my others were always YOUmoz posts. ...
Two weeks ago, Google rolled out changes to its algorithm in an attempt to decrease visibility and rankings of low quality sites on 11.8% of search queries,...
I recently created some custom filters in Google Analytics to illustrate SEOmoz's traffic over the past 12 months: SEOmoz's Traffic Sources Distribution...
By now, everyone in the SEO world is aware of the algorithmic update Google launched last Wednesday, February 23rd. Several posts on the topic are worth reading, including Danny Sullivan's take, Aaron Wall's assesment...
2011 may turn out to be the year the search engines finally conquer the "quality" problem... at least I hope so. There's been much recent buzz about Google's announcement that they are taking steps to take on the "content farms". This bodes not...
SEOmoz is one of my favorite places to have some SEO fun time, because you can always find sparkling ideas about SEO there. Today Dr. Pete wrote a post titled How Many Links Is Too Many? and explained why we shoul...
As many tests confirmed, Google algorithm counts only the first link anchor text but during the time some cheats have been tested to get more than one anchor text. Using my seo blog (named Posizioname...
There's a long-standing debate in SEO about the maximum number of links that you should place on any given page. If you use the SEOmoz PRO Campaign Manager, you may have seen a warning that looks something like this:[image 1]Digging deeper into the "Too Many On-Page Links" warning, you'll see the message:You should avoid having too many (roughly defined a...
Recently, Google added the “Instant Previews” feature, which enables users to preview websites on search results before clicking on them. It is important to analyse how these features will affect SEO strategies and the experts involved in the SEO effort. Instant Previews allow users to see a screenshot of the target page of search results, and even highlight the most r...
I’m going to make a comment here that may shock a lot of people. I hate to say it, but it may shock a lot of people who are very good at using statistics. Statistical models are not answers – they are models. Models are built in replica of a system. They may look similar, but they are not perfect and the resemblance can always b...