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.
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: ...Level Up Your SEO Skills With Our Free Training
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Should there be a Google.us for the United States?
Ian (who has now been the subject of 3 posts at SEOmoz) McAnerin asks at SEW if Google should have a .us domain for United States based searches. After all, there is a Google regio...
More Papers Written by Googlers
Google has a new, expanded list of papers and projects written by their workers online. The repository is growing quite large and for obvious reasons, Google isn't showing nearly all of them. Their ability to continue to recrui...
Understanding Stemming
Xan Porter has an excellent blog entry on the subject of stemming in search engine indices. The article points to a terrific trove of resources on stemming, how it is performed a...
Google Maps - Now with Satellite Images
Google's Maps - a very functional, often inaccurate mapping program is now using the satellite images from Keyhole, acquired last year by Google, to supplement their offerings. To the right, I've added a map of the Lake Uni...
CIIR at U Mass. - Amherst
The University of Massachusetts, Amherst houses a project called the Center for Intelligent Information Retrieval. The project is focused on solving many of the IR problems in web search and document collection search. Some of the more fascina...