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.
Even the great and powerful Google is limited in the number of operations and complexity of calculations in the algorithm. Many SEOs often attribute far more power and subtlety to Google's ranking criteria and filtering technology than is technologically p...
Early last week, Google removed its 10 words per query limit, and increased this number to 32. Some suspect this was to combat MSN Beta's ability to search up to 32 words per query. Whatever the reason, the new systema appears to have re-openend an old chink in Google...
In September of 2003, Google acquired Kaltix Corp. While this was well reported in the blogosphere and the SEO industry, it's fascincating to see the direct correlation between this acquisi...
The creation and promulgation of the SEO tools here has led to many people noting that the results returned by the tools are often different from the results they see. This problem can be pinpointed to the datacenter at Google that is being used to get the results....
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The following is a quote of a Google representative writing to JohnGalt of search engine watch forums: "The PageRank that is displayed in the Google Toolbar is for entertainment purposes only. Due to repeated attempts by hackers to...
An excellent thread at SEOChat is helping to uncover an uncomfortable phenomenon at Google - sites that rank well are very, very old. While this has been speculated about for many months, these are the first publications of any scale to be released.Read the thread - ...
In the initial testing of the survey, one fact that consistently appears in the results that rank in the top 10 are sites that have been around a long time. Obviously, these sites have had greater time to build links & content, but there appears to be little correlation between these it...
RustyBrick - a frequent poster on SEOChat and many of the other major search engine forums released a tool over the summer that conducts an advanced analysis of the links listed in Google's link command. ...