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.
Inspired by a great post by Vaidhyanathan, I began answering questions on Yahoo! Answers near the beginning of this year. Since then I have answered over 50 questions, nearly always related to metal roofing. Nearly 12 months later I sat down and did a study to find out:...
Not all Google traffic is made the same - some sources send tons of clicks, some send highly converting clicks, and rarely the twain shall meet. Sometimes, you find the strangest things when you don't expect them. Case in point: in November, we were looking into some statistics for Google traffic through our ad network (Chitika), and found that people who click the &...
NOTE - The original version of this post was written November 17, 2009. I initially wrote it to submit to YOUmoz, but since there were many posts submitted before mine, I learned it would take at least 3 weeks before my post was published. And since Google recently announced they were launc...
With the addition of real time results, and less recent music results on Google’s front page, talk has started at the office about what exactly Google is counting as a result (when it says “Results 1 - 10 of about 16,200,000”) and more importantly, what the average user is counting as a legitimate result. ...
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A few weeks ago, Google announced the introduction of automatic captions for YouTube videos (as well as videos shown on Google's video partner channels). This is certainly a big step for deaf accessibility, but some SEOs think that it has the potential to be a big step for SEO as well. ...
This past week saw the launch of Google's real-time search and quite frankly everyone flipped out. And justifiably so, it's not often that our SERPs get torn up so much in a new way like this. Questions I'd love to see the answer to are things like: What triggers rea...
Google Apps is one of the more disruptive products release by Google recently, initial promoted through large and expensive AdWords campaigns, and recently with its outdoor billboards "Gone Google Apps Campaign". But their team has been less aggressive in flexing its search optimisation weight a...
I'm a big Google fan - my wife often sleeps in their t-shirts, I speak on panels with Googlers all the time and I've even got a Google water bottle for working out (which happens all of once a month these days). However, I am NOT a fan of the Google link command, and I'm shocked by the number of folks who operate in and around the SEO and technology industries who haven't realized this. ...
In May 2007 Google announced the universal results in Google Search with the philosophy of integrating all departments Images, Blogs, News, Products, Maps, Books and videos directly to the traditional results page. ...
Our web index, Linkscape, updated again recently, and in addition to provide the traditional stats, we thought we'd share some of the cutting edge research work we do here. Below, you'll find a post which requires extremely close and careful reading. Correlation data doesn't have all the answers, but it's certainly very interesting. Likewise, the ra...
Rand recently published a post discussing 17 ways a search engine values a link. His number 5 reason referred to Domain Authority and caused a little stir within the comments trail as to what Domain Authority actually meant and where the proof of its existence has been seen. The aim of my first YouMoz post is to provide an example of where ...
If you're new to SEOMoz, or you've been in a coma the past couple weeks you may not have seen the Search Engine Ranking Factors study, which polled some of the leading minds in SEO on what they feel are the most and least important factors in regards to the SERPs. Their top five factors can be seen below: ...
The last 3 months have heralded a bevy of new tests and features from Google's search results, and it's worth taking a review of the most frequent of these and examining what it potentially holds for optimization of the future. The new results types include: Growth of Rich Text Snippets Internal Anchor Links Page-Specific "Sitelinks&qu...
Freshness seems important, but what signals does Google use to determine freshness? Do the spiders pay attention to on-page signals, such as dates in body content or URLs? I thought it might be fun to try and find out.