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.
Ready for a deep dive into the 40+ features found on Google Business Profiles and the New Merchant Experience? This article will take you through the most common features of these listings, explain what you can and can’t control on them, and teach you how to manage controllable features in the NMX. Here we go!
This post is not about the health of Google search as a product, or about the implications of improving AI products for your SEO strategy right now. (Although, I know of at least one post for this blog being written on that topic!) Instead, this post is about which of these threats, if any, actually stand a chance of unseating Google’s dominance.
Have you ever wondered how Moz employees learn internally? Well, here’s your chance to get a sneak peek into never seen before, internal webinar footage with Tom Capper! Today’s topic: PageRank.
In today’s episode, Crystal discusses how featured snippets show up in several different parts of the SERP, giving you lots of good value for organic reach, and how to claim those opportunities for your existing content.
In mid-October, we noticed a drop in this type of video result, and that drop became dramatic by late-October. Did Google remove these video results or was our system broken? As it turns out, neither — video results have split into at least three distinct types (depending on how you count).
In July of this year, Moz published a report analyzing an element of Google’s local results we termed “local pack headers”. About a month after publication, members of the local SEO community began noticing that the extraordinary diversity of headings we had captured had suddenly diminished. Today, Miriam presents a quick follow-up to the manual portion of our earlier study in an effort to quantify and illustrate this abrupt alteration.
Complete courses to master SEO basics
Learn Keyword Research like the pros
Win rankings and traffic from your competition
With recent shake-ups to the Google algorithm, Lily Ray joins us for this week’s episode to walk you through three of the most important search engine updates that can affect your SEO strategies.
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.