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.
Rand’s recent SEOmoz post offered some great tips to improve multi-city local results using SEO. I have been thinking about local results in Google also, and in my opinion, SEO techniques coupled with Google Place’s display of brick and mortal local results have gotten much too focused on physical location, and I believe I have a creative way to change up the playing field.
As people in relationships spend time with each other they start to leverage each others natural strengths to efficiently store information about the world around them. "Honey, what is the name of my Aunt's employer?" "Babe, what do you call that thing that heats bread?" They rely on each other to store information that is mutually beneficial. Some believe this p...
Have you considered using Yahoo Answers to try and drive some traffic to your website / blog? Yahoo Answers has become a very popular network for knowledge thirsty question askers and knowledge soaked answer-meisters, and they are all potential visitors for your site. This article aims to provide a detailed look at some tips / tricks for becoming the glowing Yahoo Answers guru you've always wan...
The good folks over at Direct Online Marketing posted a list of the A-Z results from Google Instant when you type in a single letter. Well that's fun, I'll try too. Survey says... half of my results are different. Location-based sugg...
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Ugh... Part of me just wants to link to this old blog post and leave it at that. But, since there's actually a bit of data to share helping to show that (at least so far) Google Instant changes less than your average algorithmic rankings update, let's share. 880,0...
Ok, in the mobile world, it is important to understand that Google sometimes lies; (Uhhh! Say it ain’t so!) Actually, all of the major search engines do it with mobile results - It is called 'transcoding.' The search engines will show the full search engine listing for the mobile-unfriendly page (like normal), but when you click on it, they will automatically take you to a temporary url that represents a ‘transcoded’ version of the page you requested, (rather than delivering you to the actual page listed in the search results). This temporary transcoded page actually lives on a subdomain hosted by the search engine, and shows a scraped version of the page you requested.
Last week at our annual mozinar, Ben Hendrickson gave a talk on a unique methodology for improving SEO. The reception was overwhelming - I've never been part of a professional event where thunderous applause broke out not once but multiple times during Ben's remarks. ...
You may be familiar with the usual onebox which has been around since 2006 (image below) and requires you to input two valid airport codes for it to appear. Lucky for us at Expedia we somehow ended up with the default link and the first link amoungst the other OLTAs. &nb...
Google's recent brand update means that a large brand can completely dominate the top 10 with a single website. Is that what searchers really want?
Today, Yahoo! formally announced that it's fully transitioning its search engine backend to Microsoft's Bing. While this is good news on many fronts for marketers (simplification of advertising platforms, a bigger competitor for Google, etc), it's a big loss to webmasters wh...
When I am thinking about mobile SEO, I pay specific attention to the order of the results and the inclusion of Universal Results. In their nature, Universal results are infinitely more clickable, as we know from traditional SEO, but in the mobile world, Universal Results are the fun results – because they are often have more potential for interaction with the phone than they would on a traditional computer.
Inspired my time on member Q&A, a step-by-step process to diagnose a missing page in 10 minutes. Can be applied to many indexation and ranking issues.
Earlier this year, jtkaczuk wrote a YouMoz post about “Using Twitter as a Sitemap”. After reading it I began to think about the power of Twitter, ReTweets, and if more RTs can help indexation. MORE……. ...
Google has found an intelligent way to arrange the results for a search query. But an interesting question is where we can find that intelligence. A lot of people conducted research into the indexing process and even more tested ranking factors on their weight, but we wondered how smart Googlebot itself is. To make a start we took some statements and com...