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.
Lately more customers are serious about SEO and are wondering if it's a good idea to choose an extra or new URL for their website. And I could not give a clear answer to this because I hear and read different stories on this topic. I decided to do alittle test and hope you guys will share your experiences on this issue with me.
Tonight, as I was writing another blog post, I started working on a graphic that probably deserves a post and discussion of its own. Below is my personal opinion of how some of the key factors in Google's ranking system have changed through the years I've been in SEO: ...
Should hiding the ownership of a domain name count as a negative against a website by Google? Websites hiding their ownership have a higher probability of being spam, fake or trying to mislead visitors. I know whenever I look up the ownership of a domain name and I see that it’s hidden, it lowers my trust of the website slightly. It takes some effort to look up every website, but isn’t that the type of effort and homework that search engines are trying to do in order to recognize who to trust programmatically?
This post is discussing a rare event that occurred in the UK. It is not often a national news story is missed by the press because the event took place after the paper went to press and before people wake up, so the only media available are television and the web. However, this happened recently in the UK.
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For my first YOUmoz blog post I'd like to be a bit confrontational. Not in a nasty way, just because I've been searching for the answer to this question for a while. Rand posted something of interest in his 12 Easy Mistakes that Plague Newcomers to the SEO Field post about wasting PageRank on pages which are blocked with robots.txt directives, something which I had been doing and something I'd been mulling over for a while.
Hello, I'm here today to talk about Google penalties. There's much talk and confusion in the SEO industry about penalties. We're always seeing in Q&A questions like: Do I have a penalty? Why do I have a penalty? How can I get rid of my penalty? ...
I often use 'Chrome' if I am expecting to have 20 tabs open or something -- I must say, it's very good for this specific reason. However, I just discovered something a little disconcerting (to me) whilst testing a few things.
For many in the SEO field, Google's "sandbox," a filter the search quality team created to help fight spam, is a relic of days gone by. However, we've been spotting new cases over the last few years, and I finally found a great example to share publicly (and got permission from the site owner). Grader.com, and the four subdomains underneath it - Twitter.Grader.com, PressRelease.Grader.com, Website.Grader.com & Facebook.Grader.com - are all under pronounced effects that highlight this algorithmic element's impact.
Google's head of web spam (a division of the engine's search quality division) recently posted a piece entitled, Why Google Won't Remove that Page You Don't Like. An excerpt: Every few weeks or so, someone contacts me and says “Hey Matt, there’s page out on ...
I was doing some keyword/competitive research for one of my client's Google AdWords Pay-Per-Click account last week and I noticed some competitors' ads were exceeding the 25-character limit for the ad titles. It appears only to happen on [exact match] keywords for ads that use Dynamic Keyword Insertion, but this is the first time I have noticed this. I am bidding on the same exact match keywords, yet my default title is served because it exceeds the 25-character limit.
I am very excited about the future of search and the possibilities that exist with new data being made accessible for search purposes. When you think about it, the one thing that is holding search back is accessibility to data. Once something is tagged with basic meta it can be searched for--imagine allowing your mobile phone to contain basic info about you that is then made available for search. This could come in handy when your friends are trying to find out what pub you are in on a Friday night!
My coworker Mike and I were pondering lunch options today and decided to order from the Honey Hole, one of Seattle's best sandwich places. Every day the place has a line out the door because it's a popular haven for hungry Seattleites who want a belly full of sandwichy goodness, so sometimes we elect to call our order in and pick it up.
I was pinging people on Twitter about what to blog about, and Michael Vandemar suggested I take a look at his post about Google web search switching to AJAX. He and some other SEOs have recently noticed that Google search results URLs have been displaying the search query string after a ha...
Thousands of posts, news articles and analysis pieces have covered the central topic of battling Google's dominance in web search, but I've seen very few that have discussed what is, in my opinion, the most telling example of the search giant's dominance. The latest (made popular across Techmeme and many individual blogs) was this piece from C|Net's Don Reisinger: