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.
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:
As search engine marketers, many of us spend a good chunk of our time studying Google's moves. We see the progress being made in GMaps, GAnalytics, GChrome, GDesktop Search, etc., and while we tip our hats to Google for developing wave after wave of innovative ideas, there's always that slight undercurrent tickling our feet and keeping us aware of Google's exponentially increasing stockpile of the world's most valuable commodity: information.
Last night while I was messing with my AdWords account, I found a new tool that Google is offering called Google Insights for Search. I spent a few hours (yeah, quite the life I live) playing with this new exciting tool. I’ll just go through a quick runthrough of an example so all the YOUmozzers can go and experience it.
A quick search for "christmas" in Google brought up something a little different from the big G. It seemed that a special addition of candy canes was what the search engine was providing this year. I'd have preferred some extra boosted rankings for oursearch engine optimisation customers but what can you do!
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To: Google cc: Matt Cutts From: FreshTrend.com Subject: Was It Something I Did??? Dearest Google, For so long now, you and I have had such a good relationship, but suddenly things have soured...was it something I did?
With every tweak and change that Google brings to its search result pages, the "potential-ROI" balance on search tips ever more towards PPC and away from SEO. I realized this when I read Aaron Wall's Marketing Lessons from Google. Search marketing leaders demand results, so it's irrelevant that the means of practicing SEO remain the same. What is relevant is that Google is decreasing the ability of SEO to provide stable, measurable results. As Aaron points out in his post, Google seeks to undermine competing business models.
When search marketers get together at a pub and talk, the conversation inevitably turns to Google's near-monopolistic share of web search. For many of us that are new to the field, Google has always been the market leader and the focus of most of our efforts. But historically, this wasn't the case. Have a look from a historical perspective: ...
Recently I was working with a client and I decided to do a little experiment, because sometimes I have nothing better to do. I wanted to know whether changing the crawl rate in Google’s Webmaster Tools really made a difference. Part of me felt Google just put it there to make people feel that Google will come to their site more often, but part of me wanted to trust Google.
This post starts out with a simple enough research exercise while watching a DVD. I have realised that I need to focus more around link building as per one of the last blog posts I read on SEOmoz.org. So I begin researching using Linkscape to begin to understand my how some of my competitors are outranking me in particular key phrases.
Rand has talked before about the need to think like a search engineer when you are doing what we do. So a week or two ago, I came up with a theory about how I would look at things if I were a search engineer and set out to prove it. I was wrong.
I decided to write this post because starting from April '08 to today, there have been more and more frequent cases of yo-yoing SERPs. But it's not the first evidence of Google's yo-yo on a big scale. Here in Italy Michele De Capitani realized and studied Google's yo-yo effect from 2007 and called it "sine waves". In 3 articles Michele explains very well how he discovered this destructive effect by monitoring different Google data centers for different websites.
As I was stumbling around the web today, building some slides out for my Pubcon sessions next week, I came across some search results I couldn't help but blog about. Have a peek: ...
One of the central goals of all the major search engines has always been to limit the extent to which manipulative activity could affect the top search results. It's been my general opinion that there's no better place to start this enforcement than our field - search engine optimization - and the SEO companies that offer this service. It was therefore to my dismay to see the following search r...
There's been some talk in the past year of Google results appearing to be case sensitive. The phenomena appeared first in the UK and as of late in US as well. No, I'm not talking about crop circles. I'm surprised that much of this has been brushed off as datacenters or, perhaps, the anchor text of inbound links, as was smartly suggested in a recent Q+A here on the 'moz.