Understanding Computer Logic
A great page from John Sofwa, a math PhD and founder of Vivomind Intelligence (who could really use a new website), gives a thorough explanation of many of the ...
Search Engines
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.
Most Recent Articles on Search Engines
New Article Listing 93 Ranking Factors
With the help of some friends from SEOChat, I've compiled a list of 93 metrics that may play large or small roles in determining how search engines rank documents in a query. This list is by no means comprehensive, but it does offer a great deal of information about each factor, as well as a relative measure of each factor's perceived importanc...
Mr. Cutts... Your Pants are on Fire
Matt Cutts is one of the friendliest, most fun people to be around at an SES conference. But, like all of us, he's not infalliable and is prone to make mistakes once in a while. Far be it from me to criticize him, however, as I too have notorious errors of judgement ...
Decption at Yahoo about Index Size; Google still bigger
As much as it pains me to have to give ground to the industry giant, Google appears to still have the edge in index size. Despite Yahoo!'s claims to over 19 billion web documents indexed, in a very good report from earlier this week, Matthew Cheney and Mike Perry from the Univ...
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Google #1 in Machine Translation
This sort of thing really scares me. Via Matt's blog, Google recently placed #1 in every category in a US government (actually from the NIST Speech Group) sponsored ...
Great Site for Learning about Term Weight
I stumbled across Professor Rich Ackerman's Theory of Information Retrieval Site today and found this excellent summary on the theory of normalized term weight. There's some nasty...
The Wrong Ip Address
Many of us have heard rumors about Google banning IP addresses or even entire blocks of IPs based on spamming or manipulative activity coming from them. Here's a case of an SEO whose found exactly this to be the case. From the post: Google will not cache the index pages for any of the sites Incomming tra...
Yahoo! Promoting Video Search with an Awards Site
Yahoo! is promoting, on their homepage no less, a video contest where users send in their favorite short videos - the promotion specifically features one of a bulldog riding on a skateboard. The videos are then consid...
Revisiting On-Topic Analysis
Since I'm in the process of re-building the information architecture for two clients this week, I thought I'd re-visit Dr. Garcia's paper - On-Topic Analysis. For those who aren't familiar with the concept behind the research, on-topic analysis is a system that's designed to help you organize your site's content by topic ...
Accuracy of Yahoo! Linkdomain
Today, Barry over at SERoundtable commented that Yahoo! appears to be having some serious issues with how many results its linkdomain command displays. Like Barry, I decided to take a deeper look into the links Yahoo! recognizes to SEOmoz.org. Here are some of the results: ...
Did Search Engines Ever Use Keyword Density
While looking around for some tokenization databases to help me build a term weight analysis tool, I came across a Microsoft article from January of 1997 on the subject of text analysis. This paper discusses some of the elements used in text processing, topic detection and classification and clearly shows that in 1997, search engine...
Natural Language Processing Software
In the field of IR, natural language processing is one of the most important tasks that an automated system must perform. The filtration & tokenization of text in particular is of great importance in order to be able to mathematically represent, classify and ultimately anal...
MSN's New Ranking System - A Neural Network
MSN's blog on web search yesterday featured the following fascinating paragraph on the subject of a shift in their technology (proba...
PageRank Decoder Tool from Search-This
Mark, over at Search-This.com e-mailed me today about a great new Flash-based tool called the PageRank Decoder that SEOs can use to determine the impact ...