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.
It appears that Google is using content from the meta description to populate the primary link for certain queries even if there is a <title> tag in place. Example:Site: http://www.nottawasagaresort.com/ Title: Nottawasaga ResortMeta Description: Nottawasaga Inn Convention Centre & Golf ResortDMOZ Description: A 575 acre resort offeri...
I've found very little written on this subject, so I thought I'd take the time to write what I have learned and hopefully raise some questions which can be addressed by people with more SEO experience than myself. I run a very photo heavy travel blog. I have a photo which I post every day in addition to ph...
Why would Yahoo! be using UA detection (User Agent) to hide links from Google?This is a question I'd love to hear an answer to after stumbling across Yahoo's homepage with my user agent set to Googlebot. Here are the screen shots...1) Yahoo homepage with UA set to default in Firefox:...
Most of us in the search space are familiar with the principles of the "query deserves diversity" (QDF) algorithm at Google, but this is almost certainly not the only intent detection process and algo-tweaking area the engine applies. One popular theory that gets inspires a good bit of discussion around the SEO water cooler is that Google may recognize queries with the potential for mult...
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Here in rainy London we have a mayoral election waiting to be announced. It's quite a big deal. I just did a quick search on Google news to see if the result had been announced yet.All the usual news sites are talking about how Boris Johnson will almost certainly win.The Telegraph though came up trumps and had a headline of :Boris Johnson wins London...
A couple of weeks ago the AIRWeb held it's 2008 conference. I've taken a stab at my own adversarial information retrieval tool...
I was happily searching Google the other day, something I do quite often. Then I noticed one result that stuck out: A page on Aboutus.org was listed twice. But the second time it had a bunch of gibberish before the URL. It appears to me there was a <br>...
Today I was trying to pull up a website when my computer had one of those hiccups. Somehow, I only managed to get .com in the address bar before I pressed enter. As it typically does when it can't find a site, my browser forwards me to Google's results for the term ".com". The results I received were a little surprising and I would like to know the SEOMOZ Co...
I may be totally wrong on this, or maybe I've overlooked some obvious explanation as to why the content on the end of nofollowed SEOmoz comment links has been indexed and ranked. Puzzling over this by myself and with friends hasn't produced any good conclusions, so I thought I'd throw this out there to the community. Nutshell: periodically, I'll search for my own name in search engi...
Google has some fantastic OneBox results. We've all seen most of them: the answer to important queries such as "number of horns on a unicorn" and ...
For the years from 1998-2005, Google and webmasters were like nerds and dating - separated by an unwritten code that kept them far away from one another. With the exception of the occasional comment by GoogleGuy on the forums or Matt Cutts at an industry show, there was virtually no connection between the search giant and those who marketed sites and content via their medium. In the sum...
This was brought to my attention a few weeks ago, but I've only now been able to look into it. This site that rates schools across the nation is a useful resource for parents--it even won an award for "Best Family & Parenting Site." Looking at the "Glendale Schools" page, at the footer I see a link that says "Glendale Real Estate." ...
I'm sure most of you out there already know that Google has its flaws, but for the most part it runs like a well oiled machine. I spent a long time working on ranking well in Google, and I've found a new problem that may not even apply to most people. Once you rank number 1 for a extended period of time, you become a trusted source for that keyword. Now I'm s...