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.
Welcome to SEOmoz blog readers and SES NYC participants who may have seen me speak at the Search Algorithms session. You've reached the right page - congrats! The following is a list of useful resources for where to find information about patent applications, research that may affect search engine technology and algorithms and general data on the function of modern information retrieval engine...
Jim Westergren sent me an email about his new article on Google's RK datapiece. Apparently, it was first reported at WMW, but Jim's done a reasonably good job of pulling out the important pieces and conducting a bit of research. RK is basically an XML tag that appears in Google's fe...
A recent topic in SC brought up an interesting update with Google: they are adding country specific results to global resul...
In a cruel, unambiguous and brutally honest fashion, Matt Cutts ripped apart a link network today. I'm feeling really bad for them. Here's what Matt said: My favorite overall moment was when a totally legit company (micromatic.com) stood up and asked fo...
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Good interview with Matt Cutts from Phillip Lenssen at Google Blogoscoped. I particularly liked this bit about valid HTML and rewarding it in the rankings: People sometimes ask whether Google should boost (or penalize) for v...
Google's new analytics setup looks impressively slick. That data, on the other hand, goes right through to big GG themselves, so all of you e-commerce nuts with cloaking, pop-ups, low co...
Wow... I'm incredibly impressed by the new Yahoo Maps beta. Why do I love it? Zooms in on mouse wheel scroll Has labeled city districts on transparency overlay Can show live traffic...
As much as I think site explorer is a great idea, in practice, it's still not as useful as Yahoo!'s normal linkdomain command. There are some fantastic features in there that I use all the time, for example: Removing sites from the list as in a search for ...
It's never easy to admit to being dead wrong, but in this instance, it would be doing the SEO community a great disservice not to make my mistakes public. In a thread at SEOChat - More on Term Weight..., I abuse members of the notion that keyword density can be used to calculate the importance of a term or phrase in a given document....
With the help of some friends from SEOChat, I've compiled a list of 93 metrics that may play large or small roles in determining how search engines rank documents in a query. This list is by no means comprehensive, but it does offer a great deal of information about each factor, as well as a relative measure of each factor's perceived importanc...
Matt Cutts is one of the friendliest, most fun people to be around at an SES conference. But, like all of us, he's not infalliable and is prone to make mistakes once in a while. Far be it from me to criticize him, however, as I too have notorious errors of judgement ...
This sort of thing really scares me. Via Matt's blog, Google recently placed #1 in every category in a US government (actually from the NIST Speech Group) sponsored ...
I stumbled across Professor Rich Ackerman's Theory of Information Retrieval Site today and found this excellent summary on the theory of normalized term weight. There's some nasty...
Many of us have heard rumors about Google banning IP addresses or even entire blocks of IPs based on spamming or manipulative activity coming from them. Here's a case of an SEO whose found exactly this to be the case. From the post: Google will not cache the index pages for any of the sites Incomming tra...