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.
Dear Google: Big Brands Aren't Enough
Google's recent brand update means that a large brand can completely dominate the top 10 with a single website. Is that what searchers really want?
6 Ways to Replace Yahoo's Link & Linkdomain Search Commands
Today, Yahoo! formally announced that it's fully transitioning its search engine backend to Microsoft's Bing. While this is good news on many fronts for marketers (simplification of advertising platforms, a bigger competitor for Google, etc), it's a big loss to webmasters wh...
10-Minute Missing Page Audit
Inspired my time on member Q&A, a step-by-step process to diagnose a missing page in 10 minutes. Can be applied to many indexation and ranking issues.
What is PageRank Good for Anyway? (Statistics Galore)
This is my first YOUmoz post, and I would greatly appreciate your feedback. I will be actively responding to comments, and I know that we will get a great discussion going. Please comment with any critique, questions, or random thoughts that you may have. If you would rather skip the statistics, feel free to jump ahead to the discussion section.
Matt Cutts Movie Marathon
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How to Determine Your True Organic Google Ranking
For years there was never a reliable way to know for sure what kind of ranking you had overall in Google for any particular keyword due to all the data centers. For a few years now, Google's webmaster tools would display ranking data for your top 100 keywords in the Top Search Queries area. However, ...
The Science of Ranking Correlations: How Does PageRank Perform?
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...
An Illustrated Guide to Matt Cutts' Comments on Crawling & Indexation
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...
Is Google Getting Too Personal?
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...
How To Monitor & Track Google's Real-time Search
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...