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.
How It's Feasible to Manually Review All Domains
After watching Nate Buggia a few weeks ago speak about Live's Webmaster Tools I was struck by his statistic about the number of domains on the web. He suggested that there are 78 million domains. Could we manually review all of them?
Google's Advice - Godsend Or Gimmick?
What's the deal with all this advice that Google employees like to give us, then? Of all the search engines (and of many companies of Google's size and scope), Google appears to be the most open with its distribution of information, its interactions with its users and its willingness to give us advice.
The X-Files of Google: 10 Inexplicably Weird Search Results
Sometimes you come across a set of search results that just don't make any sense. For most ordinary users, I suspect they probably just move on to the next query, but for those of us deeply embedded in the world of search and SEO, these noggin'-scratchers just keep on itchin'. I've collected these ten over the past couple months and figured I'd share them on the blog with the hopes of g...
Everything You Never Wanted to Know About Google Maps' Parameters
This guide came around as the result of a post I previously wrote for YOUmoz, which in itself came around as a result of a night of drinking and being sent an interesting Google SERP. That post focused on the URL parameters you can feed into Google to generate SERPs.This time however I’m looking at Google Maps....
New Reality: Google Follows Links in JavaScript.
I must have missed something. I always thought Google doesn't see links inside JavaScript code. As Rand writes in the Beginner's Guide, JavaScript passes no ranking or spidering value and pages behind JavaScript navigation may never be found by search engines if they are not reachable v...Level Up Your SEO Skills With Our Free Training
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The PageRank Hierarchy, As Defined By Celebrities
A PageRank layman recently asked me how Google decides what site gets what ranking. Rather than bore him with technical tidbits from last decade's abstract, I thought I could better express the concept through a medium we can all appreciate: celebrities.The metaphor is a simple one: PageRank is all about the quantity and quality of inbound links, right? Well, the value of a celebrity...
Cracking Google's 1,000 Page Barrier
One of the frustrations of doing SEO for large websites is the fact that Google makes it very difficult to see more than a small part of the search index. Even in Webmaster Tools, Google's index search is built on the same mechanics as its web search, which only lets you see the first 1000 pages of any result. Whether you're trying to get pages discovered, struggling with duplicate cont...
The Unofficial Google Widget Bait Guidelines
Hello again, Mozzers! Ready for another article from the World's Greatest SEO? Of course you are! One of the SEO-related topics that has received quite a bit of attention lately is widget bait. Matt Cutts discussed it at SMX Advanced, and he also answered questions about it in a recent interview with Eric Enge, intuitively titled: ...
Space Godzilla: Lessons in Monstering
It's a movie theme here on SEOmoz this week. After Rebecca's post on real movies, I'm going to talk about an imaginary one. It's a movie that would go straight to DVD, but might nonetheless be compelling for those of us who are search geeks. It's a battle between monsters - the might of Google pitched against some of the largest brands in the world. Anyone see Godzilla ...
Google's Top 100 SEOmoz Member Profiles
I was recently reading an interesting article by Portuguese SEM consultant/philosophical bear hunter, Carfeu, which brought up some questions about the Toolbar PageRank on SEOmoz members' profiles. The main question was: Why do some peop...