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.
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.
Google algorithm updates seem to come in two main flavors. There are very specific updates, like the Page Experience Update, which tend to be announced well in advance, provide detailed information on how the ranking factor will work, and eventually arrive as a slight anti-climax. This post is about the other flavor: the updates announced when they're happening or have already happened with vague guidance. The kind that can have cataclysmic results for affected sites.
On August 25, 2022, Google started rolling out the Helpful Content Update. Our resident search scientist and MozCast wrangler, Dr. Pete, looks at the results by comparing data two weeks on either side of the latest Google algorithm update.
How can SEOs possibly prove to Google, amid all the noise and competition and other experts out there, that their clients deserve a place on Page 1? To find out, Molly compared the top results on hundreds of SERPs to determine what actually proves E-A-T.
User behavior on TikTok has been evolving as its popularity grows. We’ve seen the app go from dancing teenagers to influencing shopping behavior across the world. Now, the next step for TikTok seems to be turning into the next big search engine. What does it mean for SEOs?
When the team at Brafton discovered they were being unseated in the SERPs for some commercial keywords by directories, they dug into the data to find out why and how it was happening.
After working with a news organization and testing the learnings from that work on other sites, Chris and his team started to see the immense power that freshness updates could produce in SEO. In this post, he explains why the entire SEO community has underrated the concept of “freshness”, and how to start optimizing for it.
In this sneak peek of her MozCon 2022 presentation, Crystal shows how, though SEOs have little control over which photos people take, we can optimize our brand presentation to ensure we are easily discoverable by visual search tools.
For years, SEOs have been using Google Autocomplete (aka Google Suggest) as a free keyword research tool. Yet there’s much more to this search feature, especially after all the updates Google has introduced, turning Google Autocomplete into a smart and predictive platform of its own.
Creating custom, campaign-specific landing pages is resource-intensive, and not every team has the necessary tools, expertise, or personnel to build the content. So, how do you know if you need a custom page, or if you can safely send paid traffic to an organic page and still achieve your KPIs? This three-step, data-driven evaluation helps answer this question.
By expanding the ways you talk about your product, you attract more users, which in turn scales your SEO strategy by giving you more relevant keywords to rank for. Let’s find out how using synonyms in your product-led SEO strategy can slingshot your growth forward.
If your website is like most others, there is likely a mismatch between the content you provide, and what your prospective customers search for on Google. This article is about understanding those potential customers and their conversation with Google by using the customer journey mapping method to provide them with the best content.
