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.
7 Reasons Why Search Engines Don't Return Relevant Results 100% of the Time
While search engine representatives and light hatters (the whitest of the white hatters) say that having great, link-worthy content and links is enough to get high rankings, there are many sites with these traits that do not get listed for the words that matter (the ones that send serious traffic). If it were so easy and every page that deserved a high ranking had it, there would be n...
Cloaking vs Image Replacement: Hiding Text is Not a Bad Thing
Image replacement can be a contentious issue when it comes to optimizing your websites for a search engine, but is widely supported by leading-edge web standards developers attempting to create more visually appealing websites for their users whilst still retaining semantic, accessible code.
Dan Crow of Google on Crawling, Indexing & Ranking
The SEMNE organization landed an incredible opportunity last week with a guest lecture from Dan Crow. I've seen Dan speak once before several years ago and was shocked by his overly secretive conduct. Thankfully, Google, and apparently, Dan, have changed a lot since then. He had some remarkable...
Remarkable Openness from Google's Black Box Thanks to Saul Hansel
I'm more than a little skeptical of mainstream media articles about the search engines. With so many terrible experiences - inaccuracy, bias, shallow information, agenda-based reporting - it's easy to see why. However, today I'm thrilled to see an article from Saul Hansel in the NY Times that's not only impeccably well-written, but informative to even those of in most deeply inside the search i...
Yahoo! Gets Caught With Their Hand in the Cloaking Jar
Two days ago Agerhart.com posted their discovery that Yahoo! was cloaking their Autos page. As one of our resident programmers, Jeff, put it, Yahoo! was practicing in standard, run of the mill cloaking, where they look at the IP/user-agent and serve a different p...Level Up Your SEO Skills With Our Free Training
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Yahoo!'s Homepage Got Hacked!... No, Wait a Minute...
Mystery Guest and I cruised to Yahoo! this evening and were both suddenly taken aback by what we saw: _ _ Here's a...
Why does Google hate me?
Well, not me specifically - but my MySpace page.A few months back I googled the title of my MySpace page. Just out of curiosity. Surprisingly I was in the #1 position. I say it was surprising because the title of the page is "Unattached and Unavailable". Those are two common words that actually appear often enough online that you wouldn't thin...
What is the biggest benefit of the Sandbox effect to Google?
This one might have been obvious for many people, but it just hit me today! I don't want to start a fight on this, I was just wondering if all of you ever saw it that way about the Sandbox. There are some days that you know that you are just too close to data to really be able to find what you are searching for. Our company just hired a director to develop the French market in Eur...
Yahoo! is Clearly Confused About My Personal Relationships
Just a short one that Mystery Guest pointed out to me in a huff tonight - Yahoo! search team, I think you owe her some apologetic flowers after this one. Her exact words after showing me this search were "do you love her?": ...
Two Cents on Personalized Search
Have you paid any attention to personalized search yet? If you stay logged into one of your Google accounts such as Gmail, your search history will start to accumulate. As your history grows Google starts to modify the SERPs that they send you in ways that they think will be more pleasing. I first noticed this a few days ago when Google seemed to know which site belonged to me in the SERPs....