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.
Jeff Dean of Google Speaks to UW
On October 21, 2004, Jeff Dean of Google gave a taped speech to the University of Washington's Computer Science department. Lucky for us, the UW put this ~55 minute speech on some of the more technical aspe...
Deep Insight into the Corporate Culture & Business Strategy of Google
John Heilemann, who has been writing about companies in Silicon Valley for the last ten years, has one of the most comprehensive, critical & engaging pieces on the corporat...
Approaching the End of the PageRank Era
Even a great technological innovation like PageRank will eventually be supplanted. For a web information retreival model, PR has already had a remarkable long life, yet its downfall has been predicted across the web by some of the very best in the industry. Here'...
A Glossary of Information Retrieval Terminology
Many times when reading through complex threads, research papers or even blogs by some of the more advanced SEOs in the industry, I get lost in the meaning of terms and an entire paragraph or document can be lost to my ignorance. Luckily, great resources like the...
Child Inheritance at Google
An incredibly revealing post on some theories about Google's changes over the past 12 months was first noted by TW. However, the quantity and quality of information p...Level Up Your SEO Skills With Our Free Training
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Link-Content & Link-Clustering Conjectures
In a paper titled, Lexical and Semantic Clustering by Web Links, Filippo Menczer of the Dept. of Computer Science at Indiana University, sets out...
Back Door to Google Rankings
Google has been keeping new websites out of its top rankings positions for nearly 1 year. Sadly, this has made the results far less relevant for ordinary users. Google probably assumes (hopefully incorrectly) that their brand loyalty will never die and that the prevention of SEO t...
Term Weight & Glasgow Weight vs. Keyword Density
For search engines, keyword density has long been held to be a reliable measure of the concentration of a particular keyword or phrase on a specific page. However, this method of mesurement has long been known in the scientific community to be a poor repres...
Chart of Google's -asdf Phenomenon
SEOmoz has put together a small chart analyzing the top 20 results for two searches at Google, one a normal 2-word phrase, and the other with much discussed -asdf filter (done by appending 15 -asdf onto the back of the query). The two unique results sets have been a...
Yahoo! a Better Buy
An article in Forbes - Yahoo!'s Growth Prospects 'Superior' To Google's - notes that Merrill Lynch has upgraded earnings estimates for Yahoo! w...