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.
At the end of May I took a 10 day vacation to Miami, it was amazing. Before that, things had gone great with our sites, communities around the German cardgames Skat and Doppelkopf: We had been climbing up the rankings steadily, b...
This is my first YOUmoz post, and I would greatly appreciate your feedback. I will be actively responding to comments, and I know that we will get a great discussion going. Please comment with any critique, questions, or random thoughts that you may have. If you would rather skip the statistics, feel free to jump ahead to the discussion section.
In 2010, Matt Cutts has released over 70 Webmaster Help videos, I watched them all, so you don't have to (although you probably should).
I've been having a similar conversation with a number of folks from the world of search that's interesting enough as to deserve some transparency and discussion. It centers around the idea of the web's link graph and how it operates to power the rankings of relevant results in the major search engines. If we follow this brief timeline, you'll see what I'm getting at:1993 - 2...
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As the Director of SEO R&D for Slingshot SEO, an Internet startup born in the cornfields outside the great city of Indianapolis, Indiana, I’m fascinated by and driven to understand the complexity of Google’s “computationally intense algorithm.&rdqu...
A while ago I set up an experiment to test Google's support for crawling pages that use AJAX and, because Google took a bit too long to index the page, I forgot all about it. Then, today I found the PHP code I used for the test so checked Google and found the page had been indexed. I thought I'd share the test for anyone who is interes...
For years there was never a reliable way to know for sure what kind of ranking you had overall in Google for any particular keyword due to all the data centers. For a few years now, Google's webmaster tools would display ranking data for your top 100 keywords in the Top Search Queries area. However, ...
I've been an SEO for a long while - nearly 8 years. In all that time, I still haven't been able to wean myself off the intoxicating drug dealt out by the Google toolbar - that "little green fairy dust" called PageRank. Intellectually, I know its flawed in lots of ways, but so many people in our field (and in the broader webmaster/marketing community) still talk about...
It's pretty obvious that no one will ever be able to crack Google's overall ranking algorithm. In fact, Google engineers probably couldn't tell you exactly why one site is ranking where it is for a particular query without researching that site like any SEO would.
Late last week, Eric Enge of Stone Temple (and a co-author of mine on The Art of SEO) published a fascinating interview with Google's head of Webspam, Matt Cutts. I think the whole of the S...
There's been a lot of talk in SEO about how personalized search affects the future of rankings, but it seems to boil down to one simple fear: does my client see the same rankings that I do? I decided to put this to the test...
Like 150 million or so other folks, I spent today watching the Superbowl. As a marketer, it's hard not to pay close attention to the advertisements, and this year featured a heavy focus on sending viewers to the web. However, I was a bit surprised that we didn't see anything like ...
How do you get articles indexed and ranking in Google News? This blog post, which builds off the information provided in the Google News publisher help center and in Maile Ohye's awesome video on Google News, provides publishers with a basic primer of factors to consider before submitting articles to Google News.
So, 2010 looks like it may the year that Google starts to push page loading speed as a factor for Ranking in the SERPS. During 2009, Google released “Page Speed” – a Firefox add-on which helps web designers and website owners optimize their sites for speed.This was Google planning ahead for the introduction of page loading times as a ranking factor, and sure...