Child Inheritance at Google
An incredibly revealing post on some theories about Google's changes over the past 12 months was first noted by TW. However, the quantity and quality of information p...
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
Link-Content & Link-Clustering Conjectures
In a paper titled, Lexical and Semantic Clustering by Web Links, Filippo Menczer of the Dept. of Computer Science at Indiana University, sets out...
Back Door to Google Rankings
Google has been keeping new websites out of its top rankings positions for nearly 1 year. Sadly, this has made the results far less relevant for ordinary users. Google probably assumes (hopefully incorrectly) that their brand loyalty will never die and that the prevention of SEO t...
Term Weight & Glasgow Weight vs. Keyword Density
For search engines, keyword density has long been held to be a reliable measure of the concentration of a particular keyword or phrase on a specific page. However, this method of mesurement has long been known in the scientific community to be a poor repres...
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Chart of Google's -asdf Phenomenon
SEOmoz has put together a small chart analyzing the top 20 results for two searches at Google, one a normal 2-word phrase, and the other with much discussed -asdf filter (done by appending 15 -asdf onto the back of the query). The two unique results sets have been a...
Yahoo! a Better Buy
An article in Forbes - Yahoo!'s Growth Prospects 'Superior' To Google's - notes that Merrill Lynch has upgraded earnings estimates for Yahoo! w...
How to Remove the Google Filter when Searching
Early last week, Google removed its 10 words per query limit, and increased this number to 32. Some suspect this was to combat MSN Beta's ability to search up to 32 words per query. Whatever the reason, the new systema appears to have re-openend an old chink in Google...
Site Flavored Theme Detection from Google
In September of 2003, Google acquired Kaltix Corp. While this was well reported in the blogosphere and the SEO industry, it's fascincating to see the direct correlation between this acquisi...
Google's Results Different for Everyone
The creation and promulgation of the SEO tools here has led to many people noting that the results returned by the tools are often different from the results they see. This problem can be pinpointed to the datacenter at Google that is being used to get the results....
A Google Rep's Comments on PageRank in the Toolbar
The following is a quote of a Google representative writing to JohnGalt of search engine watch forums: "The PageRank that is displayed in the Google Toolbar is for entertainment purposes only. Due to repeated attempts by hackers to...
Age of Websites
An excellent thread at SEOChat is helping to uncover an uncomfortable phenomenon at Google - sites that rank well are very, very old. While this has been speculated about for many months, these are the first publications of any scale to be released.Read the thread - ...
Older Sites Succeeding?
In the initial testing of the survey, one fact that consistently appears in the results that rank in the top 10 are sites that have been around a long time. Obviously, these sites have had greater time to build links & content, but there appears to be little correlation between these it...
Analyze the Google Link Command
RustyBrick - a frequent poster on SEOChat and many of the other major search engine forums released a tool over the summer that conducts an advanced analysis of the links listed in Google's link command. ...