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.
Matt Cutts and I have a beautiful relationship - I bother him enough and he gives me answers to questions that are bothering webmasters. It's a cross between symbiotic and vampirical (vampiristic?). Thankfully, Matt has once again let me suck away some of his precious time to address some big issues. After this, I think I'll let him have a rest and probably go after poor Tim. I've poste...
A few months back, I posted the saga of how I helped a client finally escape from Google Supplemental. Given the positive response to that article and some great follow-up questions, I closely tracked some relevant Google data over the four months since and thought I'd share some of what I learned. ...
Google has demanded webmasters hide paid links through the use of code manipulation like 302 redirects, JavaScript, robots.txt and nofollows. This goes against their Webmaster Guidelines which state: Make ...
Mystery Guest and I were running some queries on Yahoo! earlier this afternoon, when we received my personal favorite search results UI test pages, the beloved Purple Yahoo! Purple Yahoo! is a rare beast, from what I've seen. This is only the second time I can remember being served the results, though I know others have seen it before ...
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As a midyear Christmas present, I'd like to ask Google for a few things that would make my life a bit easier. Just to clarify, Google, I love you very much and I think you're superb, but everyone can do better. These are my requests:
My business' website recently fell victim to some of Google's penalty measures. Thankfully I was able to overcome them and just wanted to share my experiences. In the course of searching for answers and a remedy to the problem, I read some of the articles from SEOMOZ (particularly this one by randfish) http://www.seomoz.org/blog/how-to-handle-a-google-penalty-and-an-example-...
Over the past couple of weeks most SEO blogs have made mention of Google removing their supplemental results search feature.Rand asked nicely in his post: Google - Please Bring Back the Supplemental Results Query; It's Incredibly Valuable but from some of Matt Cutt...
While search engine representatives and light hatters (the whitest of the white hatters) say that having great, link-worthy content and links is enough to get high rankings, there are many sites with these traits that do not get listed for the words that matter (the ones that send serious traffic). If it were so easy and every page that deserved a high ranking had it, there would be n...
Does everyone have a Google gadget except you? Here is what you do.1) Go to the Google gadget directory 2) Click the little link that says "Add by URL"3) Enter your feed URL and click "Add"You are finished, your feed is now a Google gadget....
Image replacement can be a contentious issue when it comes to optimizing your websites for a search engine, but is widely supported by leading-edge web standards developers attempting to create more visually appealing websites for their users whilst still retaining semantic, accessible code.
The SEMNE organization landed an incredible opportunity last week with a guest lecture from Dan Crow. I've seen Dan speak once before several years ago and was shocked by his overly secretive conduct. Thankfully, Google, and apparently, Dan, have changed a lot since then. He had some remarkable...
Tonight, Matt McGee noticed that the supplemental results query at Google, using the format: site:yoursite.com *** -asdf is no longer functioning. I'm fairly certain that the source of this issue can be traced back to a Mr. Matt Cutts, who was permitted to sit in at the "Give It Up" session at SMX where one of the first broadly public mentions of th...
Wierdness Number 1 - Google only displays 36 results for a 'wikipedia' searchOk, so I was trawling the referring keywords to our blog the other day and noticed that we'd had 3 clicks for the keyphrase 'wikipedia' following this blog post on why wikipedia is ...
I came across a rather interesting discovery while doing some research for one of my small business clients today: it seems to take only one Local advertiser (different from a standard Web Search advertiser) to trigger an entirely new set of PPC results in Google Local.The easiest explanation is probably by example -- consider the difference between the following searche...