Search Engines

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.

Most Recent Articles on Search Engines

Revisiting On-Topic Analysis
Rand Fishkin

Revisiting On-Topic Analysis

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 ...

Accuracy of Yahoo! Linkdomain
Rand Fishkin

Accuracy of Yahoo! Linkdomain

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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