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.
There's been quite a lot of talk recently about some weird things going on in the Google.co.uk search results. If you're watching the UK SERPs closely you should have noticed some unusual fluctuations in the search rankings with lots of US websites showing up were only .co.uk's used to sit. This has become a trendy topic with webmasters brainstorming the issue trying to find a clue ...
We've heard a lot of speculation lately about the future of rankings – the SERPs are clearly evolving, and what was once a simple list of 10 results has gradually become personalized, localized, and wikified. It begs the question: As the SERPs diversify, do rankings matter as much as they used to?
The blog post - PageRank Sculpting - from the head Google's Web Spam team is a critical read for SEOs worldwide: So what happens when you have a page with “ten PageRank points” and ten outgoing links, and five of those links are nofollowed? Let’s leave...
Google Authorization is a topic which crops up a fair amount in our day-to-day search wanderings. Not really because clients are asking if we're authorized but more because they always claim that previous SEO companies they received pitches from claimed to be Google Authorized SEO consultants. Unfortunately (fortunately?!) no such certification exists so we have to set them straight....
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I orignally wrote this blog post back a little while ago, but between the server crashes and all that I think it got lost in translation so.... This was my Saturday night at about 3-4am... *insert Twilight Zone music here* As I write this blog I am listening to Groove Armada's Superstylin, I just finished watching the video from Google I/O and quite frankly, Google Wave is Superstylin! Do the Wave!
After my post last night and the many follow ups from around the SEO sphere, I (along with most observers from the world of search) strongly anticipated clarifying statements from Google's representatives at the SMX Advanced conference. Unfortunately, there's very little to report. The best I have comes from secondary sources, albeit relatively trustworthy ones:
Today's article from Search Engine Land: Google Loses "Backwards Compatibility" on Paid Link Blocking & PageRank Sculpting is a must read, but it's frustratingly hard to understand Google's position shift on the topics. In this post I'll talk briefly about ...
I recently attended Google I/O on Wednesday May 27th as I among the other approximately 4,000 attendees recieved a free Google Android Ion Phone as I wore my SEOMoz shirt from SMX Advanced 2008. Later I was having lunch with Danny Sullivan of Search Engine Land as well MG Siegler of TechC...
Two seemingly unrelated announcements in the past few weeks are actually pretty significant when combined with a few other ideas. I’m talking about the release of the Google Analytics Data Export API and the recent announcement that Google is jazzing up the information available from the referrer strings. This post addresses how both can be used to create a profoundly optimised site structure that pretty much tends to itself.
I have recently gotten into SEO/SEM reputation management work, and I encountered Rip Off Report on a professional level. Wondering why it was so hard to get Rip Off Report away from the top of Google, I started reading up all the many articles on Google and Rip Off Report. The site clearly breaks many of Google's guidelines, yet it continues to rank at the top of Google. Rip off Report's legitimacy is that of a mobster, yet Google continues to reward them with a rather high rank.
After many phone calls from Adwords certified companies telling us our Adwords accounts were not set up in a cost effective way, it made me finally put down the organic SEO and grab PPC with both hands. Throughout my findings I decided because we rank no. 1 for a lot of our main keywords naturally, we would focus on exact match keywords to filter the rubbish and just catch the juicy relevance searchers. We also ensured the conversion tracking was set up to maintain our cost per clicks and ROI. And so I started to delve deep into the reporting produced from the previous year of activated keywords…and I'm glad I started looking.
Usually, I believe Google tries to act logically. Since I began researching SEO back in 2007, all of the theories made sense. So, as I approach new problems, I try to think them through logically and analyze why Google would do such a thing! My latest problem arose in the beginning of April, when I lost some of my major rankings on Google.
Last week I gave the keynote presentation at SMX Munich, Lessons Learned Building an Index of the WWW. In that presentation, I shared a great deal of data from our web index as well as some SEO tips based on our experience replicating many search engine activities (crawling, indexing, building a link graph, de-duplicatio...
Hello, my name is Tom, you've seen me guest blog here before but today I'm blogging and ill. So I'm going to dispense with the usual chit-chat approach and lay out the facts. Some of you may even like it that way! Shame on you. Still, here's the content.