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.
At Stone Temple Consulting, we've spent some time playing with the Google Ajax Search API and the Google Ajax Feed API. These are great tools for embedding dynamic content in your web site. This post is going to talk about how to use these two APIs to do just that.
For years as a website designer, I struggled building sites that both fit in Internet Explorer and Netscape. The entire time, I didn't care who won the browser war I just wanted someone to win NOW and the other to go away. The increased work, stress, and money spent to build the same thing twice was frustrating and in my opinion unnecessary. The search engine wars a...
Aaaaaaaaaaargh! Here's a conversation I've just had with a Google AdWords support person. It reflects how ridiculous the historical account factor can be in determining quality score. (But then again, Paul showed that the exact same campaign on two different accounts would be rated differently, in terms of...
Recently I got my hands on an 8 years old domain, with no backlinks at all. The site is very small, about 20 pages with no significant content and it is pure HTML. The perfect little site for experimenting. I has all the weight of an old domain and no bad history, or even a slight attempt for search engine results manipulation. The current experiment I something i read about a while ago...
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The story ends here. We should better say the story has ended much before it even actually started. Google (Tom Phillips) has announced to sell off ...
The year was 1999. Dissatisfied with the difficulty of finding topic relevant information on “the Internet” that he had personally invented only two years earlier, technology industry visionary Al Gore Jr., invents a means of significantly improving the search process with the creation of the world’s first “Search Engine”, based on a complex mathematical fo...
Most of you are probably aware that you can utilize the same HTML file to verify Google Webmaster Central access for several different domains and subdomains. Google makes that very easy to implement. Simply keep the HTML file handy and load it up in whatever folder you need to verify. I've been doing this for over a year now with Google HTML verification files. Why ...
I'm currently testing different SEO tactics on a new site that I built as part of a contest where I work. We were all given the same keyword to try to rank for and at the end of 60 days, whoever is in first position in the organic SERPs in Google is the winner. Only stipulations were that we had to buy a new domain, couldn't use an existing one, and we couldn't put any form of the k...
I read a great article about the Google Inline Search boxes today over at Get Elastic and was immediately inspired about how we structure our page titles can really effect our users perceptions and ease in finding information; especially using new services like googles new search box. Take a look at the following image of the insite search in action: ...
I'm sure we have all seen it, or have had it happen to us. You are doing a search on Google and you get a results page that says "Did you mean, ####" at the top of the page. I firmly believe that this is a helpful tool to many people who are either horrible spellers, or had a momentary "brain-fart"! But what do you do when this affects your own search engine traffic?...
So here's an interesting thought... You're Google. You have every page on everyone's site in the world (or near as makes no odds) indexed. What more can you do with that information?Well, how about providing a search function for that person's site. Looks like that's what the big G is thinking at the moment at any rate. Have a look at the following examples, and see w...
How would you feel if all you'd ever been told about monitoring patent applications was a lie? What if the SEO experts told you all these lovely things ... because they themselves were fooled by Google's own patent marketing? Allow me to explain.This semester, I'm taking Industrial and Intellectual Property. Prof. Gold is ...
Tonight I'm in Portland for tomorrow's SEMpdx Searchfest conference, where I'll be giving a keynote address at 9am on The Algorithmic Evolution of Search Engines and the Impact on Search Marketing Campaigns. Like most keynotes, it's designed to be more of a broad overview, focusing on understanding the hows and whys of m...
Sometime in the last week, it seems that Google has lowered the standards for Sitelinks. I've seen them for the (only) 2 sites I manage, and Ann Smarty (seosmarty.com) has seen sitelinks for a client with whom she has not done work for in 3 months. I was talking to someone here at SMX West (name withheld for privacy reasons) and he said th...