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.
Rand got me all excited with his post. I've been tracking down the French vertical of "web design / website design" theme of keywords for the last 12 months. This vertical is very similar to the English one. As an example, if you wanted to score well for Web Design in English on Google.com, you would try to hit, in the long term, the best keywords, like:...
AOL search data - why am I posting this under Google? Because AOL uses Google for their search.I recently grabbed a copy of the AOL search data that was released earlier this month. The dataset is rather large - 450MB compressed - over 1.4GB uncompressed in MySQL.This...
Here's the last belated Matt Cutts video transcript. This one was posted on Matt's blog on August 8th (and there's a shout out to yours truly!). It exclusively has to do with the launch of Google Webmaster Central, which Rand covered in a ...
Hey everyone, Rebecca here. I'm back from San Jose (and San Diego for a brief R&R), and I have GREAT news. Apparently my toiling over transcribing Matt Cutts' videos has paid off big time, because he and I are totally BFF (best friends forever). Seriously, check this out: ...
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Poor Vanessa Fox, working late on a Friday night. I felt so bad for her, I just had to post this timely review of Google's new Webmaster Central, which is replacing sitemaps (and including its old functionality). There's a lot of material to cover, so let's ...
A little bird passed me a rumor today that I can neither confirm or deny, but it's certainly worthy of discussion. The theory goes - when launching a new site, buying a significant quantity of AdWords/AdSense for the site is a good way to tell Google the site isn't spam and avoid long waits in the sandbox. Here's my take on this: There is some logic in the idea that a...
If this were America, surely security would haul off this man in a heartbeat. But it's not. This is Japan, land of the weird and wacky (I know, did I mention I lived there for 10 months?) and Japanese comedian Razor Ramon merely brushes them aside with a... thru...
Dear Mr. Cutts,I want to start off by saying thank you for taking time out of your undoubtedly busy life fielding SEO's most burning questions. That being said, I beg you to please stop answering questions via video. I've been chained to my desk for over a day now, and my skin has been rubbed raw from the cuff around my ankle (and from my unsuccessful attempts to gnaw off my own foot)....
Boy, what did I get myself into? Rand has chained me to my desk and ordered me to summarize the next set of videos released by Matt Cutts. This new batch of summaries is more verbatim than the last one, so enjoy.1. Does Google treat dynamic pages differently than static pages?...
Via Threadwatch, I came across some Google videos of Matt Cutts fielding questions that he had received through his blog comments. I was initially quite interested in seeing the videos, as I thought he would be including demonstrations or visuals to aid in answering the qu...
It appears that Google's new checkout system provides an added bonus and strong incentive - namely a nifty little icon that helps your site stand out in the AdWords listings on search results pages. See below: ...
Kudos to Cristian Mezei's SEOpedia blog for a great list of secretive, hidden or long-forgotten pages behind Google's domain. There's more than 25 unique pages listed, but a few of my favorites include: ...
I came across this banner ad from Yahoo! today and was a bit shocked. I love the raciness and implied issues with the genetalia of older men, but I hope Yahoo! is keeping these highly targeted as I could certainly imagine that it wouldn't play well with much of their demographic. ...
More sandboxing problems at Google with a big name brand - this time it's Chris Pirillo's TagJag site, which was 301'd several weeks ago from the Gada.be domain. Let's see what the search engines have to say about this high profile move.... Yahoo! (tagjag.com) ...