Google Blog Search ranking explained

Posted 20 March 2007 10:14am by Graham Charlton with 1 comment

Bill Slawski at SEO by the Sea has an interesting post which gives an insight into how Google's Blog Search ranks its results. He has come across a patent application by Google which explains some of the ranking factors.

The patent application, 'Ranking Blog Documents', shows how Google ranks blogs according to searchers' queries based upon a combination of relevance and quality scores.

Positive ranking factors include:

• How many blogrolls list the blog - especially from high-quality blogrolls or blogrolls of respected bloggers.
  
  
• Links from other sources - including mail and chats.
  
  
• How well tags are used to categorize a post.
  
  
• PageRank
  
  
• The number of subscribers to your blog feed -  using data gathered from feed readers.
  
  
• Clicks in search results.
  

Factors which may have a negative effect on ranking:

• Automated posting - an anti-spam measure.
  
  
• Different content between the site and the feed - an indication of a low quality/spam blog.
  
  
• The amount of duplicate content. 
  
  
• Using words and phrases that appear frequently in spam blogs.
  
  
• Posts that have identical size.
  
  
• Linking to a single web page -  "If the number of links to any single external site exceeds a threshold, this can be a negative indication of quality of the blog document."
  
  
• The location/quantity of ads - if ads are seen in the recent posts of a blog, they could be considered a negative quality factor.
  

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