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 PageRank layman recently asked me how Google decides what site gets what ranking. Rather than bore him with technical tidbits from last decade's abstract, I thought I could better express the concept through a medium we can all appreciate: celebrities.The metaphor is a simple one: PageRank is all about the quantity and quality of inbound links, right? Well, the value of a celebrity...
One of the frustrations of doing SEO for large websites is the fact that Google makes it very difficult to see more than a small part of the search index. Even in Webmaster Tools, Google's index search is built on the same mechanics as its web search, which only lets you see the first 1000 pages of any result. Whether you're trying to get pages discovered, struggling with duplicate cont...
Hello again, Mozzers! Ready for another article from the World's Greatest SEO? Of course you are! One of the SEO-related topics that has received quite a bit of attention lately is widget bait. Matt Cutts discussed it at SMX Advanced, and he also answered questions about it in a recent interview with Eric Enge, intuitively titled: ...
It's a movie theme here on SEOmoz this week. After Rebecca's post on real movies, I'm going to talk about an imaginary one. It's a movie that would go straight to DVD, but might nonetheless be compelling for those of us who are search geeks. It's a battle between monsters - the might of Google pitched against some of the largest brands in the world. Anyone see Godzilla ...
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I was recently reading an interesting article by Portuguese SEM consultant/philosophical bear hunter, Carfeu, which brought up some questions about the Toolbar PageRank on SEOmoz members' profiles. The main question was: Why do some peop...
Many of you saw this post from seoco.co.uk this morning (or its Sphinn thread) about our Web 2.0 Awards being removed from Google's index. We noticed the same thing late last night and spent some time this morning going through what could have happened. We ...
I just took a premium account with SEOMoz and saw the canonicalization video. It was impressive except the https part of it. It said that, for https try to redirect to http in case of bot and otherwise show the https page, as https pages are meant for users not for bot. Yeah, somehow I can agree but I still won’t recommend doing such a work ...
Most of us in the search space are familiar with the principles of the "query deserves diversity" (QDF) algorithm at Google, but this is almost certainly not the only intent detection process and algo-tweaking area the engine applies. One popular theory that gets inspires a good bit of discussion around the SEO water cooler is that Google may recognize queries with the potential for mult...
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A couple of weeks ago the AIRWeb held it's 2008 conference. I've taken a stab at my own adversarial information retrieval tool...
I may be totally wrong on this, or maybe I've overlooked some obvious explanation as to why the content on the end of nofollowed SEOmoz comment links has been indexed and ranked. Puzzling over this by myself and with friends hasn't produced any good conclusions, so I thought I'd throw this out there to the community. Nutshell: periodically, I'll search for my own name in search engi...
This was brought to my attention a few weeks ago, but I've only now been able to look into it. This site that rates schools across the nation is a useful resource for parents--it even won an award for "Best Family & Parenting Site." Looking at the "Glendale Schools" page, at the footer I see a link that says "Glendale Real Estate." ...
At Stone Temple Consulting, we've spent some time playing with the Google Ajax Search API and the Google Ajax Feed API. These are great tools for embedding dynamic content in your web site. This post is going to talk about how to use these two APIs to do just that.
The year was 1999. Dissatisfied with the difficulty of finding topic relevant information on “the Internet” that he had personally invented only two years earlier, technology industry visionary Al Gore Jr., invents a means of significantly improving the search process with the creation of the world’s first “Search Engine”, based on a complex mathematical fo...