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.
Well, not me specifically - but my MySpace page.A few months back I googled the title of my MySpace page. Just out of curiosity. Surprisingly I was in the #1 position. I say it was surprising because the title of the page is "Unattached and Unavailable". Those are two common words that actually appear often enough online that you wouldn't thin...
This one might have been obvious for many people, but it just hit me today! I don't want to start a fight on this, I was just wondering if all of you ever saw it that way about the Sandbox. There are some days that you know that you are just too close to data to really be able to find what you are searching for. Our company just hired a director to develop the French market in Eur...
Just a short one that Mystery Guest pointed out to me in a huff tonight - Yahoo! search team, I think you owe her some apologetic flowers after this one. Her exact words after showing me this search were "do you love her?": ...
Have you paid any attention to personalized search yet? If you stay logged into one of your Google accounts such as Gmail, your search history will start to accumulate. As your history grows Google starts to modify the SERPs that they send you in ways that they think will be more pleasing. I first noticed this a few days ago when Google seemed to know which site belonged to me in the SERPs....
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Danny Sullivan was in town over the weekend and on Saturday night, Vanessa Fox from Sitemaps invited Mystery Guest and me over to Google's Kirkland offices. We had a ton of fun and got to meet some new (and very friendly) Googlers. Just a few photos: ...
For several years now, Google has disabled its link command via web search. Actually, what it's done is worse, providing mis and dis-information, causing thousands of search marketing professionals to receive questions every day on why "Google only knows about 10 of my links." However, I was thrilled today to find that their link search works flawlessly in their ...
Ever since I first saw Matt Cutts, Google's head of search quality, "investigating" sites through his super-secret application (during an SES conference in NYC); calling out spammers and identifying crawl and ranking issues for curious site owners, I've wondered about the content of his tool collection. What secrets can Googlers pull up on comma...
In addition to the brilliant editing of the WebProNews team, this video actually has a lot of great content from Vanessa - she tackles questions in a straightforward manner that you can't help but appreciate. Thanks, Vanessa. ...
Google has always attempted to collect an extraordinary amount of data about users (and webmasters in particular) - a few recent ...
Team Fresh Egg has noticed a strange phenomenon, and it appears to be an ongoing issue from at least August 2006. It seems that home pages (and only home pages) of .com sites hosted in the UK are disappearing from Google's results when you do a site: search and filter the results to only show pages from the UK. I've played around with various sites, and while the home pages pop up under the normal...
Michael Martinez, when he was a blogger and regular commenter here at SEOmoz, often chided me for holding the viewpoint that rankings are "all about links." Recently, there's been more conversations along those lines, both here at SEOmoz and ...
Introducing the problemIn setting up a ranking system based on links, it soon became clear to Google that link manipulation remained a threat to the objectivity of their search results.With patents filed in the early 2000’s such as Hilltop, ...
And now, a brief rant about YouTube:Call me a purist, but when I do a search for something like "the killers mr. brightside music video," I don't want 29 of the 30 search results to be of some a-hole teenager lip-synching to the damn song. You may think your video is cool, Mr. A-Hole Teenager, but it's not. It doesn't have Eric Roberts in it. Only The Killers' music video doe...
Lots of bloggers are commenting about this thread at Digitalpoint on why Google's algo has never been leaked. My take on the algo - it would barely help if it was public knowledge. Yes, we'd all sit down and analyze all the cool things Google can detect about trust and gaming and spam and manipulation... and then? Then, w...