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.
I've been an SEO for a long while - nearly 8 years. In all that time, I still haven't been able to wean myself off the intoxicating drug dealt out by the Google toolbar - that "little green fairy dust" called PageRank. Intellectually, I know its flawed in lots of ways, but so many people in our field (and in the broader webmaster/marketing community) still talk about...
Late last week, Eric Enge of Stone Temple (and a co-author of mine on The Art of SEO) published a fascinating interview with Google's head of Webspam, Matt Cutts. I think the whole of the S...
There's been a lot of talk in SEO about how personalized search affects the future of rankings, but it seems to boil down to one simple fear: does my client see the same rankings that I do? I decided to put this to the test...
This past week saw the launch of Google's real-time search and quite frankly everyone flipped out. And justifiably so, it's not often that our SERPs get torn up so much in a new way like this. Questions I'd love to see the answer to are things like: What triggers rea...
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I'm a big Google fan - my wife often sleeps in their t-shirts, I speak on panels with Googlers all the time and I've even got a Google water bottle for working out (which happens all of once a month these days). However, I am NOT a fan of the Google link command, and I'm shocked by the number of folks who operate in and around the SEO and technology industries who haven't realized this. ...
Our web index, Linkscape, updated again recently, and in addition to provide the traditional stats, we thought we'd share some of the cutting edge research work we do here. Below, you'll find a post which requires extremely close and careful reading. Correlation data doesn't have all the answers, but it's certainly very interesting. Likewise, the ra...
Rand recently published a post discussing 17 ways a search engine values a link. His number 5 reason referred to Domain Authority and caused a little stir within the comments trail as to what Domain Authority actually meant and where the proof of its existence has been seen. The aim of my first YouMoz post is to provide an example of where ...
Freshness seems important, but what signals does Google use to determine freshness? Do the spiders pay attention to on-page signals, such as dates in body content or URLs? I thought it might be fun to try and find out.
The blog post - PageRank Sculpting - from the head Google's Web Spam team is a critical read for SEOs worldwide: So what happens when you have a page with “ten PageRank points” and ten outgoing links, and five of those links are nofollowed? Let’s leave...
Google Authorization is a topic which crops up a fair amount in our day-to-day search wanderings. Not really because clients are asking if we're authorized but more because they always claim that previous SEO companies they received pitches from claimed to be Google Authorized SEO consultants. Unfortunately (fortunately?!) no such certification exists so we have to set them straight....
Today's article from Search Engine Land: Google Loses "Backwards Compatibility" on Paid Link Blocking & PageRank Sculpting is a must read, but it's frustratingly hard to understand Google's position shift on the topics. In this post I'll talk briefly about ...
Usually, I believe Google tries to act logically. Since I began researching SEO back in 2007, all of the theories made sense. So, as I approach new problems, I try to think them through logically and analyze why Google would do such a thing! My latest problem arose in the beginning of April, when I lost some of my major rankings on Google.
Lately more customers are serious about SEO and are wondering if it's a good idea to choose an extra or new URL for their website. And I could not give a clear answer to this because I hear and read different stories on this topic. I decided to do alittle test and hope you guys will share your experiences on this issue with me.
Tonight, as I was writing another blog post, I started working on a graphic that probably deserves a post and discussion of its own. Below is my personal opinion of how some of the key factors in Google's ranking system have changed through the years I've been in SEO: ...