How Google Ranks Blogs
I read this amazing blog post about how Google’s Blogsearch ranks blogs. It’s featured on Problogger but written by Alister Cameron.
I haven’t read Cameron’s blog before but I’m subscribing to it on my Bloglines (which needs some Spring cleaning soon). After reading this post I don’t think I want to use all of Google’s products. It makes me feel like they are spying on me (and on us) too much.
Since I can’t link to a post on Podango and the formatting looks bad, here is my list:
Factors in how Google Ranks Blogs in their blog search engine Blogsearch:
- popularity of your blog (how many people click on your posts)
- how often your blog is listed on other’s blogrolls
- the quality of the blogrolls that link to you (A high quality blogroll is a blogroll that links to well-known or trusted bloggers)
- pagerank of your blog
- how many other blogs subscribe to your RSS feed and the popularity of those blogs
Google can tell if you have subscribed to your own feed or spammed the sytem. He thinks this is one of the MAIN ways Google ranks your blog because it shows loyalty. They may use data from their RSS reader, Google Reader. They can also see if people actually read and/or click on your posts.
- Social bookmarking - how often your post is bookmarked in Digg, Technorati, del.icio.us, etc. It also matters what tags they choose to describe your post. Here are rules for Social Media Optimization (SMO).
- Google looks for links to your blog in email, chat, even TWITTER (so use to your advantage! Twitter is good for more than building community, sharing news, or as a personal branding tool. It could help you build your blog rank too.)
It appears Google uses a different algorithm when ranking blogs.
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8 Responses to “How Google Ranks Blogs”
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April 17th, 2007 at 10:12 pm
thanks for the link - Alister certainly wrote a nice post didn’t he - big scary though!
April 17th, 2007 at 10:28 pm
Darren,
You found and commented on this almost instantly. Thanks!
This post is ugly with all the bold. My template is messed and it doesn’t show links if they are within bulleted lists.
Do you Twitter?
Best,
Janet
April 18th, 2007 at 1:26 am
Janet,
Thanks heaps for this write-up. I had a lot of fun writing that post and trying to think below the surface about what Google was thinking.
One thing I didn’t make too clear that with hindsight I would have liked to… that patent is OLD, meaning that what we see now as Blogsearch is based on about 18 months more “brain power” on Google’s part… of course I have no idea what that means in terms of refinements/changes.
We can only speculate and TEST!
Thanks again
-Alister
April 18th, 2007 at 8:42 am
I was reading that post last night about the same time as you, I think
It is pretty amazing stuff. I wonder how much of that they’re already using in their algo for blogsearch as opposed to things they might implement at a later date. A lot of stuff I’ve read in their other patents seem to be things for future use. For example, they might not be scanning our email to see which blogs are being mentioned, but they wanted to file for a patent because they might want to do it in the future…or maybe they just wanted to patent the idea so nobody else could beat them to it. Also, like Alister says in his comment, that patent is old, so maybe they’ve got a lot of time and brain power behind them now, so they’ve likely added additional ways of ranking blog posts.
April 18th, 2007 at 2:29 pm
Wow this is pretty helpful, I have yet to see anything information regarding blog aspects in the search algorithm. There will be definitely more changes to come but I think as of right now blog’s aren’t a huge factor in search engine success but they are important. What I’m wondering is how a new algorithm with blogs factored into will use the “nofollow” tag.
April 18th, 2007 at 7:26 pm
Alister,
Thanks for commenting! Nice ligatures on your name and blog design! I need a blog redesign, did you design it yourself? I’m convinced that I need better branding…I just haven’t the time to do it. Now that I’ll use it in my work as a internet marketing coach, I think it needs some work. I want less geek, more web reporter.
Janet
April 19th, 2007 at 12:54 pm
[...] Additionally, Janet who writes for the blog Newspapergrl recently pulled together some other exellent materials on how to ensure that your blog gets the “google juice” that you really are hoping for. [...]
April 22nd, 2007 at 5:00 pm
What I enjoy the most about the difficulty with Google’s blog grading system is that these stipulations are all reasons why it shows how important it is to have good content and truly influence people’s lives. I despise spammers and how they make money (even though it can be tempting) because it is never really long lasting. No one benefits, but them. Why should they get charity? Great blogs have amazing content that deservedly should be high on search engines because it will really help people in their lives in some way. It is true business. I am curious to know what are good techniques to get people subscribing to your RSS Feed?