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.
Jim Westergren sent me an email about his new article on Google's RK datapiece. Apparently, it was first reported at WMW, but Jim's done a reasonably good job of pulling out the important pieces and conducting a bit of research. RK is basically an XML tag that appears in Google's fe...
I'm no longer seeing different results or different numbers of results for any searches I perform at Google with inanchor and allinanchor. I can't find any official reference to this change, but since they were working in January, my initial assumption is that BigDaddy caused the effect, which is why some folks can still see the allinanchor results on certain datacenters (or for certain phrases...
Larry & Sergey better watch their credit cards. Travis reports on Cre8asite today that Googlebot signed up as a new customer at an e-commerce site he manages. From the post: I d...
Mike Davidson, of Mike Industries (and CEO of NewsVine), has done some research into whether invalid code, nested tables and some other HTML factors can affect rankings at the search engines. My favorite bit: ...
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Just a quick question for readers - how long did it take you from when you first learned about SEO to install the Google toolbar and check out PR on every site? And, conversely, how many weeks/months/years until you uninstalled it? For me, it was about 10 days into first learning about SEO back in 2002 that I installed the toolbar. It wasn't until July-August of 2004 that I finally got ...
Xan has a good post today exploring the world of TDT - Topic Detection research. We've been trying to work on something quick and dirty that automatically classifies a web page into a hierarchical category structure based on the key terms and phrases we've found to be common in that topic area. We've had no s...
A recent topic in SC brought up an interesting update with Google: they are adding country specific results to global resul...
I owe a big thank you to Mike Marshall from Fortune Interactive, who walked me through their SEM Logic product today (demo page here). The technolog...
In a cruel, unambiguous and brutally honest fashion, Matt Cutts ripped apart a link network today. I'm feeling really bad for them. Here's what Matt said: My favorite overall moment was when a totally legit company (micromatic.com) stood up and asked fo...
Good interview with Matt Cutts from Phillip Lenssen at Google Blogoscoped. I particularly liked this bit about valid HTML and rewarding it in the rankings: People sometimes ask whether Google should boost (or penalize) for v...
Google's new analytics setup looks impressively slick. That data, on the other hand, goes right through to big GG themselves, so all of you e-commerce nuts with cloaking, pop-ups, low co...
Wow... I'm incredibly impressed by the new Yahoo Maps beta. Why do I love it? Zooms in on mouse wheel scroll Has labeled city districts on transparency overlay Can show live traffic...
As much as I think site explorer is a great idea, in practice, it's still not as useful as Yahoo!'s normal linkdomain command. There are some fantastic features in there that I use all the time, for example: Removing sites from the list as in a search for ...
It's never easy to admit to being dead wrong, but in this instance, it would be doing the SEO community a great disservice not to make my mistakes public. In a thread at SEOChat - More on Term Weight..., I abuse members of the notion that keyword density can be used to calculate the importance of a term or phrase in a given document....