Hi all,

I believe I read someplace that you can make a blog out of a simple webpage on your site, just by formating it the same as a standard 'blog'...

i.e. I've maintained a website for 5 years now that's had one specific page formatted very similar to a blog - entries in reverse chronological order, archived every month, and updated 2 to 5 times every week. I'm pretty sure I read on an SEO forum that such a site is just as good as an 'official' blog as far as enjoying the same google benefits...

Over the last few months I've watched how often it gets indexed/spidered by google, and it seems to be every few days or so.. the same frequency as cnn.com has gotten from what I can see. :)

Is that frequency similar to a typical blog or are they indexed by google daily as opposed to every few days?

I realize blog software is MUCH faster and more convenient to use for this purpose than updating and ftping an html page, but if I was to go the html route - and added it to an RSS feed and pinged blogspot etc - would it be considered the same as a blog by google..?

Thanks for any insights,

-Steve

To start off, let's think about what a blog is exactly. By every definition I've read a blog simply refers to a site that is updated often and whose content written by one or many authors is the focus on the site. There are of course much more specific ideas concerning blogs such as running a set format or being of a personal nature or such but search engines hardly care about those.

With this in mind, what will google think? Well, regardless of whether you update via a CMS system or by hand your site is getting new content constantly. Google and all other good spiders see this new content and read it all in. To them the site is full of fresh content and thus needs fresh bots to go out as soon as possible. From my experiences google doesn't care what exactly your site is so much as what's happening on it. Forums with “friendly” urls, blogs, even general sites that are constantly updated get indexed all the time. Clearly the volume is too high for google to update right away or show updates instantly but the fact that your site is getting visited constantly implies that google certainly knows it's changing and that means they will keep coming back.

When it gets down to things using an update-by-hand method may be tedious but it could benefit you with google. Since everything is static all of your urls should be search engine friendly as well (of course they could appear so on a dynamic site as well). Also, all of your updates change the last modified time/date of the document and thus as far as anyone can tell you are just as dynamic or blog like as the next site. To the world your site is as much a blog as the next... to google it is certainly a site to visit regularly and refresh constantly… and if you add those features you were talking about even picky users would have to agree that it is indeed a blog!

So.. a blog by any other name smells just as sweet. :)

Thanks for confirming that for me, Ted. As you say, it would take more effort to do a blog by hand than by using blogger et al, but I think I'd have more control over the design this way for what I have in mind.

I appreciate your feedback.

Regards,

-Steve

Using software just makes it easier and faster to add entries...

I have 4 blogs.
Creditwrench

A news blog

Smoker's rights

Oklahoma Smoker's rights

So I do an awful lot of blogging and I'm always needing new content. Sometimes I have to shuffle stuff around in order to keep up the flow of news and articles and keep fresh content coming in to make it work as well as it does.

I also try to help others get into blogging. If anybody is having a hard time figuringout how to go about it they can simply send an email to blogs@autobotinfo.com and they will get back instructions on how to set one up, a very nice template for blogspot that they can copy and paste right into blogspot.com and a link to a webpage that gives them an analysis of the template they got in the emails that is color coded so they know what they can change and what they can't or should not change, where to put their links and really makes it clear and easy to see the whole process and how it works.

I think one is much better off going with blogspot.com than they are just about any other way one might think of.

Easy as all get out to use once you get the hang of it.

If you're going to go with a provider, I'd choose Blog-City before BlogSpot. The Spot has a pretty consistent set of problems in dealing with permalinks, archives, and content. The sites tend to be slow, as well.

Notably, I run my blogs on Vervehosting, which gives me more than enough bandwidth, more than enough space, and a whole lot of cool features. The software I use to keep my blog up and running is MovableType--exceptionally good blogging software.

There is a new hosted blog service that most people don't know about yet: http://www.motime.com.

Better than Blogspot for many reasons, it is free, fast, very simple to use -- but with more cool features. (The free blogspot service does not allow comments and puts a huge banner on your blog.)

motime gives you comments, permalinks, easy link management, lots of templates (completely editable), a browser-based instant messaging to receive alerts about comments to your blog, a digest which reports all comments and updates to other motime blog that you read...and you can set up group blogs....anyway, a much cooler service.

It might be a great service, but it's in italian! I could not find anything that looked like an "english" link on the whole site.

See my posting on the free blog widget. We have developed it into a cool little tool and are offering it free to the webproworld forum folks... It has a very slick admin area (web-based) and a snip of code that you place on your site where you want it to appear...
Let me know if you want a copy...

__________________
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intelligent design for commerce
Web Strategy / Design / E-Commerce Implementation / Photography

I couldn't agree more about motime, it is brilliant, no fuss, loads of features and a lot more user freindly than some.

I can't praise them enough.

MOTIME is in English! Motime has a sister site in Italian called Splinder.it, that other writer must have somehow clicked through to the that site. . .

Hi,

I clicked thtough to the www.motime.com link - and it took me straight to the italian site......either something wrong with their link, or motime in English has erm...gone?

If anyone can get to the English version, I would love the URL as we are considering an 'Inside Karate Kid' blog.....

__________________
http://www.Karate-kid.co.uk - the professional martial artists choice

I don't understand, I clicked the link you went to and it's English?

here is the register page

http://www.motime.com/user/register

The register user page is English, but the www.motime.com that you posted originally definately take you straight to the italian version!

Really odd, but thanks for the second URL

__________________
http://www.Karate-kid.co.uk - the professional martial artists choice

Got it!

Motime.com IS English, however your original link has a fulls top after the .com bit......for some reason this takes you to the italian site!

Clever........:)

__________________
http://www.Karate-kid.co.uk - the professional martial artists choice

Sorted!

Well done for spotting that

For blogging, I like to take a multi faceted approach. There is alot of good software and some great applications out there, but in the end, if you want it to be search engine friendly, it needs to be on a static page. So whatever you do to blog, I also recommend making a no frills html page of posts you really want people to read, and linking to them on your template.