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.
Does "Query Deserves Diversity" Algorithm Exist at Google?
Most of us in the search space are familiar with the principles of the "query deserves diversity" (QDF) algorithm at Google, but this is almost certainly not the only intent detection process and algo-tweaking area the engine applies. One popular theory that gets inspires a good bit of discussion around the SEO water cooler is that Google may recognize queries with the potential for mult...
Google Spam Illuminates the Algo's Reliance on Domain Authority
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Building a Better Spam Detector
A couple of weeks ago the AIRWeb held it's 2008 conference. I've taken a stab at my own adversarial information retrieval tool...
Google Follows Nofollowed Links in SEOmoz Comments?
I may be totally wrong on this, or maybe I've overlooked some obvious explanation as to why the content on the end of nofollowed SEOmoz comment links has been indexed and ranked. Puzzling over this by myself and with friends hasn't produced any good conclusions, so I thought I'd throw this out there to the community. Nutshell: periodically, I'll search for my own name in search engi...
Is Yahoo Buying Text Links?
This was brought to my attention a few weeks ago, but I've only now been able to look into it. This site that rates schools across the nation is a useful resource for parents--it even won an award for "Best Family & Parenting Site." Looking at the "Glendale Schools" page, at the footer I see a link that says "Glendale Real Estate." ...Level Up Your SEO Skills With Our Free Training
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Google's Ajax APIs
At Stone Temple Consulting, we've spent some time playing with the Google Ajax Search API and the Google Ajax Feed API. These are great tools for embedding dynamic content in your web site. This post is going to talk about how to use these two APIs to do just that.
The True Origin Of Google
The year was 1999. Dissatisfied with the difficulty of finding topic relevant information on “the Internet” that he had personally invented only two years earlier, technology industry visionary Al Gore Jr., invents a means of significantly improving the search process with the creation of the world’s first “Search Engine”, based on a complex mathematical fo...
Did You Mean? - No, I Didn't
I'm sure we have all seen it, or have had it happen to us. You are doing a search on Google and you get a results page that says "Did you mean, ####" at the top of the page. I firmly believe that this is a helpful tool to many people who are either horrible spellers, or had a momentary "brain-fart"! But what do you do when this affects your own search engine traffic?...
Is Google Making Site Search Redundant?
So here's an interesting thought... You're Google. You have every page on everyone's site in the world (or near as makes no odds) indexed. What more can you do with that information?Well, how about providing a search function for that person's site. Looks like that's what the big G is thinking at the moment at any rate. Have a look at the following examples, and see w...
The Bizarre Economy of Links - Portland SEMpdx Keynote
Tonight I'm in Portland for tomorrow's SEMpdx Searchfest conference, where I'll be giving a keynote address at 9am on The Algorithmic Evolution of Search Engines and the Impact on Search Marketing Campaigns. Like most keynotes, it's designed to be more of a broad overview, focusing on understanding the hows and whys of m...