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.
As my previous posts and articles have tended to be too technical, going forward I will simply try to provide the pieces that are relevant for the discussion, and point to the sources for learning more. After carefully reflecting on the article that prooves Google is u...
Dear Friends: I published a website earlier this year on the American folk song, Follow the Drinking Gourd. I closely tracked how the three major search engines handled the site, including how quickly the site was ranked, how many pages each of the three major engines found, how often they visited these pages, and h...
Vanessa Fox, Webmaster Central's long time head of operations, announced her departure from the company today. There's more specific news about that on her personal blog, so I won't dwell on it here. What I do want to do in this blog post, and hopefully in the comments below, is to express our thanks to Vanessa. I don't belie...
The other day I read a blog post that blew me away. Entitled "Google Bounce Factor Research Data Is In" and written by Visio, it was about the first real experiement that proves Google is using behavioral data in...
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I'm more than a little skeptical of mainstream media articles about the search engines. With so many terrible experiences - inaccuracy, bias, shallow information, agenda-based reporting - it's easy to see why. However, today I'm thrilled to see an article from Saul Hansel in the NY Times that's not only impeccably well-written, but informative to even those of in most deeply inside the search i...
Two days ago Agerhart.com posted their discovery that Yahoo! was cloaking their Autos page. As one of our resident programmers, Jeff, put it, Yahoo! was practicing in standard, run of the mill cloaking, where they look at the IP/user-agent and serve a different p...
DMeurope has a very interesting article describing how Google might look like in the near future. Google calls its vision - Universal Search. And no, it doesn't mean they are going to index all those weird martian porn sites. Frankly, that would be impossible, even for Google.The US in bi...
I noticed an engaging blog post from Stoney DeGeyter over at SearchEngineLand this evening (or rather, morning/afternoon for our American & European readers) - The Ranking Roller Coaster Cause & Effect. It's definitely worth a read, but I also wanted to point out one specific area that we see causing the "rollercoaster&quo...
Mystery Guest and I cruised to Yahoo! this evening and were both suddenly taken aback by what we saw: _ _ Here's a...
Google is quickly becoming the world's largest ad agency, now entering print ads in newspapers and radio ads across the world...
Recently, Rand did a Whiteboard Friday on the topic of Supplemental Pages. He took a more moderate view than a recent Forbes article on the same topic. During the discussion of ...
There has been a lot of debate recently in "SEO News Land" (aka all the SEO blogs I subscribe to) about various testing Google has been doing. Particularly with how they treat the display of their paid ads.This morning I noticed something I hadn't seen before and no-one else in the office could re-create (on a side note - is it just co-incidence that they picked the one SEO...
Not since the famous “SEO in for troubled times” article has there been so much controversy in the SEO world. On April 14th, 2007 Google’s Engineer/unofficial spokesman Matt Cutts announced on his ...
Well, not me specifically - but my MySpace page.A few months back I googled the title of my MySpace page. Just out of curiosity. Surprisingly I was in the #1 position. I say it was surprising because the title of the page is "Unattached and Unavailable". Those are two common words that actually appear often enough online that you wouldn't thin...