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.
One of the challenges that small businesses have is being found in local search. I have a chart based on some studies that I share with prospective clients to show them the importance of optimizing their whole site - not just buy PPC with some keywords. When we optimize a business site, we like to look at all aspects and fine tune from messaging to sales conversions. We ask the customer to...
I use Google every day. Multiple times per day. I also use Gmail, Analytics, Adwords and Google Reader every single day. In fact there are plenty of Google products I use on a regular basis. For me, that's the advantage of Google...everything I need in one place with one login, and it all works extremely well. I expect most people reading this are the same.So when should you switch search engi...
A long time ago I had read a quote in a blog post - An SEO that never had a website penalized is not a good SEO. I am not a black hat SEO and work with a very respectable online marketing agency, I am just tired of being beat by blackhat SEOs due to a too forgiving God Google.The penalty (was a -30 penalty) that made me a good SEO happened to my&...
A PageRank layman recently asked me how Google decides what site gets what ranking. Rather than bore him with technical tidbits from last decade's abstract, I thought I could better express the concept through a medium we can all appreciate: celebrities.The metaphor is a simple one: PageRank is all about the quantity and quality of inbound links, right? Well, the value of a celebrity...
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One of the frustrations of doing SEO for large websites is the fact that Google makes it very difficult to see more than a small part of the search index. Even in Webmaster Tools, Google's index search is built on the same mechanics as its web search, which only lets you see the first 1000 pages of any result. Whether you're trying to get pages discovered, struggling with duplicate cont...
Hello again, Mozzers! Ready for another article from the World's Greatest SEO? Of course you are! One of the SEO-related topics that has received quite a bit of attention lately is widget bait. Matt Cutts discussed it at SMX Advanced, and he also answered questions about it in a recent interview with Eric Enge, intuitively titled: ...
It's a movie theme here on SEOmoz this week. After Rebecca's post on real movies, I'm going to talk about an imaginary one. It's a movie that would go straight to DVD, but might nonetheless be compelling for those of us who are search geeks. It's a battle between monsters - the might of Google pitched against some of the largest brands in the world. Anyone see Godzilla ...
Dear Matt Cutts, I was reading Rand's recent post and looking at all the comments from the members of SEOmoz, and it got me thinking about a few things. I started writing a comment in response to the one you had left... but after about 1000 words, I realized that my comment-sized opinion had evolved into a blog-sized ra...
Last week, Google held a live chat session with a number of terrific engineers from the spam, search quality & webmaster central teams. Barry Schwartz posted a text transcsript of the chat up on SERoundTable that I read through, hoping to find...
I was recently reading an interesting article by Portuguese SEM consultant/philosophical bear hunter, Carfeu, which brought up some questions about the Toolbar PageRank on SEOmoz members' profiles. The main question was: Why do some peop...
Yahoo SearchMonkey has been advertised for a while and recently has been made public. For those who don't know about it, the idea is that you can enhance the appearance of listings in search results to include photo, links, and other useful stuff. Obviously it doesn't change where you rank in Yahoo's SERPs, but it can be used to make your listing stand out from the crowd.
Many of you saw this post from seoco.co.uk this morning (or its Sphinn thread) about our Web 2.0 Awards being removed from Google's index. We noticed the same thing late last night and spent some time this morning going through what could have happened. We ...
My last post I talked about my experience hosting images on Flickr and the total lack of traffic I recieved from Google Image search. I decided to take it a step further and see if I can get some more data on this.My general hypothesis is that Google give a preference to images hosted on the same domain as the page it is linked from. The rational for this fr...
Okay, so here's my thoughts. The challenge will not come from within. The brain drain from google is one thing, the new and "improved" search engines are another. However, taking a bigger picture look at "who has what" allows another angle.Most major companies have web analytics software, there are a few major players in this space and they have the informa...