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View Full Version : Blogs? What can they tell us about ranking?



minstrel
11-07-2003, 10:16 AM
Excerpt from another newsletter:


Blogs and Search Engines Rankings

Currently, blogs tend to get great rankings in search engines. Why? Content and linking.

Unlike regular business sites, by their very nature blogs are based on updated information which makes them extremely rich in content. Many blogs are updated several times a day with new articles, thoughts and information. After months or even weeks of inception, a blog can be seen as a wealth of topical knowledge, a quality that search engines such as Google cherish.

Blogs also contain a wealth of links. Since bloggers constantly look for ways to keep their blogs updated, they are likely to provide links rather than solely create all their content themselves. Many bloggers are "old school" Internet believers who have not forgotten that links from site-to-site helped to found the Internet and are not as worried about losing visitors to other sites. Therefore, making a link request of a blogger is likely to yield a much better response than a link request of a regular web site. And such density of linking can lead to high search engine rankings.

My first thought was, "yikes! do we now have to compete with my 13 year-old niece's on-line diary?". My second was, blogging aside, there are some interesting comments/hints here for search engine placement.

cbp
11-07-2003, 02:59 PM
Blogs do well in search results for same reason as any site - content and links (as it said in your quote). But, personally I find them cluttering up the search results as most are not necessarily relevant to what I was looking for.

I have noticed a trend from some webmsters to get a free blog and put links from it back to their main site in a vain attempt to increase rankings of the main site. The prob with that is that the blog will have PR=0 unless they get links to the blog (maybe anchor text minor benefit). They won't get links to the blog without having something in the blog that is worth linking to - that requires the 'hard yards' ... they would be better putting that effort into improving the main site.

I think what people see is that some blogs (unfortunatly too many) rank well in search results, so think they get a blog --> rank well --> links to main site ... it just does not work that way without putting in the effort.

Having said that, I have picked up some good links from blogs that are PR3 & PR4 from bloggers related to my site and a couple from blogs that could not be more unrelated!!!

I am also going to put in a big guess here (please do not quote me as fact) ... the influence of blogs in search results seem to have varied from time to time - so I have wondered if Google may see a problem with this and have experimented with algorithm tweaks or filters to change this ... but then again Google owns blogger.com ... maybe I detect a conspiracy theory coming on :-)

CBP