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.
A few months ago, I was out of my office for an appointment with a client in downtown Montreal. Since I knew (well, I thought I knew!) how Google Adwords IP geotargeting system worked, I wanted to give him a demo with a concrete example. I used, as my example, my own firm's Adwords campaign, which had the keyword “conception web” (translation: “web design”) geotarge...
Google has always attempted to collect an extraordinary amount of data about users (and webmasters in particular) - a few recent ...
Team Fresh Egg has noticed a strange phenomenon, and it appears to be an ongoing issue from at least August 2006. It seems that home pages (and only home pages) of .com sites hosted in the UK are disappearing from Google's results when you do a site: search and filter the results to only show pages from the UK. I've played around with various sites, and while the home pages pop up under the normal...
Michael Martinez, when he was a blogger and regular commenter here at SEOmoz, often chided me for holding the viewpoint that rankings are "all about links." Recently, there's been more conversations along those lines, both here at SEOmoz and ...
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Introducing the problemIn setting up a ranking system based on links, it soon became clear to Google that link manipulation remained a threat to the objectivity of their search results.With patents filed in the early 2000’s such as Hilltop, ...
I was inspired by Xan Porter's recent post on Evaluating Web Page Quality. Search engines have their own evaluation signals, but as they try to improve in quality, it's only natural to pursue more human metrics in order to refine to the greatest possible degree. The research she points to - ...
What Google News syndication offers is not simply a way to develop targeted traffic, but it can also serve as a powerful indirect link building method in itself. Traffic If you get syndicated by Google news, you can immediately tap into unique traffic streams. Likewise, if you can provide a genuinely useful source of news, users will bo...
And now, a brief rant about YouTube:Call me a purist, but when I do a search for something like "the killers mr. brightside music video," I don't want 29 of the 30 search results to be of some a-hole teenager lip-synching to the damn song. You may think your video is cool, Mr. A-Hole Teenager, but it's not. It doesn't have Eric Roberts in it. Only The Killers' music video doe...
Lots of bloggers are commenting about this thread at Digitalpoint on why Google's algo has never been leaked. My take on the algo - it would barely help if it was public knowledge. Yes, we'd all sit down and analyze all the cool things Google can detect about trust and gaming and spam and manipulation... and then? Then, w...
It’s roughly three months since I wrote about the project site (original post), and it’s time to take a peek how the site is doing. I admit that I’m still being extremely lazy/busy, and have done lots of t...
There's a new Google hack (or something I was not aware of) in town, and I'm in love with it. It allows you to see an estimate of how many pages in a specific domain are supplemental results. To see the hack in action, just type the following at Google: site:www.mydomain.ltd ***i.e. SEOmoz...
Google has been using "onebox" results for travel related searches since at least October of 2005. I'm forced to wonder if, during the entirety of that period, Google's been sending the default link to Expedia. For example: I searched for Seattle to New York and got:...
Almost everyone in the industry who's had a chance to interact one on one with a Googler in the past 6 months has probably noticed that it "feels" different from the interactions of the past 3 years. Robert Scoble did a good job describing it with regard to his recent visit to the 'plex...
Although it's a bit hard to follow, Dr. Garcia (aka Orion), who operates the Miislita site and blog, has a great blog post on the Latest SEO Incoherences (a clever acronym pun on LSI). He ta...