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.
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...
Yahoo! is promoting, on their homepage no less, a video contest where users send in their favorite short videos - the promotion specifically features one of a bulldog riding on a skateboard. The videos are then consid...
Since I'm in the process of re-building the information architecture for two clients this week, I thought I'd re-visit Dr. Garcia's paper - On-Topic Analysis. For those who aren't familiar with the concept behind the research, on-topic analysis is a system that's designed to help you organize your site's content by topic ...
Today, Barry over at SERoundtable commented that Yahoo! appears to be having some serious issues with how many results its linkdomain command displays. Like Barry, I decided to take a deeper look into the links Yahoo! recognizes to SEOmoz.org. Here are some of the results: ...
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Ian (who has now been the subject of 3 posts at SEOmoz) McAnerin asks at SEW if Google should have a .us domain for United States based searches. After all, there is a Google regio...
Google has a new, expanded list of papers and projects written by their workers online. The repository is growing quite large and for obvious reasons, Google isn't showing nearly all of them. Their ability to continue to recrui...
Xan Porter has an excellent blog entry on the subject of stemming in search engine indices. The article points to a terrific trove of resources on stemming, how it is performed a...
Google's Maps - a very functional, often inaccurate mapping program is now using the satellite images from Keyhole, acquired last year by Google, to supplement their offerings. To the right, I've added a map of the Lake Uni...
The University of Massachusetts, Amherst houses a project called the Center for Intelligent Information Retrieval. The project is focused on solving many of the IR problems in web search and document collection search. Some of the more fascina...
A new thread at SEW explores the concept and value of a link over time. Does a long-standing link constitute trust or laziness? Are many new links to a site a sign of its current popularit...
Ricardo Baeza-Yates and Berthier Ribeiro-Neto's Modern Information Retrieval is considered the standard for Information Retrieval courses at Universites like Berkley, U Mass & Stanford. The book is surprisingly easy to read, even if some sections ...
On October 21, 2004, Jeff Dean of Google gave a taped speech to the University of Washington's Computer Science department. Lucky for us, the UW put this ~55 minute speech on some of the more technical aspe...
John Heilemann, who has been writing about companies in Silicon Valley for the last ten years, has one of the most comprehensive, critical & engaging pieces on the corporat...
Even a great technological innovation like PageRank will eventually be supplanted. For a web information retreival model, PR has already had a remarkable long life, yet its downfall has been predicted across the web by some of the very best in the industry. Here'...