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.
(This is my first post to you blog so go easy one me!) Today I came into work and straight away started to run all my usual reports, went to make a cup of tea and when i came back to my desk i almost fell off my chair. We dropped 20 places! We had dropped position on our second highest keyword by 20 places (on Google.com.au for Australian sites...
Recently, I made the difficult decision to change the domain name of my blog and consulting website. It had to be done; the old name just didn't make sense anymore, no one could spell it, and it was terrible for SEO. Of course, I knew all of the rules of successful 301 redirection, in theory, but when it came to putting theory into practice, I found myself dreading pulling the switch....
I don't think I am the only one who had to read The Crucible in high school and listen to their English teacher compare the play to McCarthyism in the 50s. And I can't be the only one sitting here thinking that Google is on the same type of ob...
I am unsure if this is the right place for this post, however this is the place I have spent many hours for the last year or so, and I am so concerned right now that I cannot think of a better place. So here is the story. I have been participating in the Zlio affiliating program since Apr 2007, and until recently, especially in terms of SEO, it was a dream. With a week, my old website of 300 pages was ranking ahead of Ebay, Nextag, Shopping.com etc for many competitive keywords. I was very happy with the results and they were in place for over six months. Although I spent many hours working on my shops and acquired some quality link exchanges, I noticed that other Zlio affiliates were also performing extremely well.
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Two posts in one.This was originally going to be about the disconnect between what SEOs worry about and the average internet user. But a recent Shoemoney post made me want to bring up a combined issue. And while each could have been its own post, I decided to combine it. SEOMoz points be damned.Myopic SEOs and Search Engines If you as...
This is interesting. Go to www.yahoo.com and type in Barry Bonds (e.g.)See the drop down list? Nice.. but apart from assumed relevancy application to these suggestions, are they also based on actual search volume and listed in order based on volume? I would assume so.This appears to be Yahoo!s answer to Google Suggest Search, but it doesn't...
If you've been on the Yahoo! home page in the last few days, you've seen this phenomenon: The red box around the Indiana Jones 4 link should, by all rights, take the user to a Yahoo! Movies page about the upcoming film - after all, Yahoo! has had links like these for ye...
The other night I was watching Knocked Up, and in the movie there are a few references to "Googling" something. For example, in one scene the older daughter is riding in a car and casually says "I Googled murder," while in another scene Leslie Mann's character asks Paul Rudd to "Google" their daughter's symptoms to determine whether she has the chicken pox or a rash. I also recently saw The Bourne Ultimatum, and in one scene Jason Bourne uses Google to search for an agent's name, and later on there is a car chase where the guys in one car are using Google Maps o...
Tomorrow morning starts my 8 hours of presenting for our first SEOmoz training seminar. As such, I ahve very limited time for blogging tonight, but I wanted to share this hard-to-believe piece of data: According to ...
Every once in a while, someone on SEOmoz comments about ranking #1 on Google for a search term like "sexiest man in SEO". Some of this is deliberate, either just in good fun or an exercise in SEO prowess, but frequently we also rank #1 for terms we never intended to, just by building search-friendly sites.So, just for fun, let me put a question out there to all of you Mozzers: ...
I think that sometimes we in the field of search marketing try to make the practice more difficult than it really is. True - there are hundreds of ways to build a link, an infinite number of keywords, thousands of unique sources to drive traffic along with analytics, design, usability, code structure, conversion testing, etc. However, when it comes to the very specific question of how to rank w...
I admit it - I struggle to understand patent applications (one of the big reasons that Si is part of our staff). However, Bill Slawski doesn't and it's made our collective lives in the SEO world (and the mozplex) considerably easier. Take, for example his two incredibly fascinating posts collecting patent applications and speculating on how the engines m...
Yesterday morning, I did the same thing I always do: Check my company email, talk to the salesmen, scour SEOMoz for new info,and check on my site's analytics for the day prior.Man, did I get shock...my average time on site had been reduced to less than one-third of what it had been. I panicked, screamed, shaved my head and burned a picture of Matt Cutts in effigy. After ...
I think there has been a change in the Google algorthym which is upgrading older pages and downgrading newer pages. I am basing this statement on the 14 websites I run. These websites are of different age and sit on different servers, registered under different name.We have a strategy than when have new content for it to be totally unique. We research the topic and include totally orig...