Blogs perform better in Search Rankings

Blogs perform better in search rankings than commercial websites.

Why is this so?

Blogs have stayed true to the form of the early webpages. They are text-based and link to others sites. Commercial sites often contain no external links due to short-sightedness of the people paying the bills, and as a result other sites do not link to them. Commercial sites often contain lots of graphics,or have flash intros. Search engines cannot index these - they can't search a graphic or a flash movie for keywords.

All this has made these sites become islands - the owners hope that users get
stranded on these islands, once they have found their way by clicking on an ad, or from seeing the URL on a package.
There are many isolated islands like this on the web - think about it, how many times have you been surfing and found yourself on a site and the only  way you have
browsed away is to type in a new URL or click the "back" button?

Is this what the web is about?

The word "web" conjures up an image of interconnection. Blogs are not afraid to connect to each other which is what makes them so interesting.

Google values this interconnection and ranks sites with large link popularity higher than others.

This is why a blog can help your business.

You may see no value in having links to other sites on your main commercial website. However if you have a complimentary blog you should link to other sites. You should aim to make your blog the expert in it's field. This will make your blog popular and people will link to your site. It is very difficult to get sites to link to your main commercial site unless they are advocates of your product; conversely it is much easier to make people advocates of your blog. Once your blog gains high link popularity and thus high page rank, people searching the web for your product will find you more easily either via your blog or because the resultant lift in page rank for your blog will also lift your main website. Often users will find your site instead of a competitor - wouldn't that be cool?

The Oklahoma Wine News blog is a good example of this practice. The blog is about the Oklahoma wine industry as a whole, but is a complimentary blog to the Nuyaka Creek Winery website. When one searches for Oklahoma Wine on Google,the blog is ranked #1 above 570,000 relevant sites - above their local competitors.

So remember, don't be afraid to link to other sites in your blog, even competitors - your business will gain by doing so. Blog readers value this interconnection, and this is what they want to see. If I wanted to read isolated pockets of information, then I could go to the public library and save all those ISP bills. That said, don't just link for the sake of linking - you need original content as well as links. If you just point to other sites and say "look at this, ain't it cool?" in every post then what is the value of your site?

On 09:32:21 2 June 2004 Alex Chudnovsky wrote:
>> This is why a blog can help your business.
>
>And how long would it take for blogs to be removed or
>separated from main default search indexes?

Why would google remove blogs from an index?

Blogs are usually more relevant and contain the information you are actually looking for, so is not that the point of a search engine?

John

On 09:50:13 2 June 2004 John Wards wrote:
>Why would google remove blogs from an index?

Why blogs are hot property now, and why were they advocated in post above? Thats right - they allow to get better rank in search engines due to more active interlinking characteristical of blogs, something that Google's PageRank loves so much.

So, the main objective to justify blogs for business appears to be their temporary ability to gain better rank. Is this a fair gain? Well, I am not convinced it is given that main objective appears to gain better rank! It is already known that blogs were used to spam Google to get top rank for results that are hardly relevant (see "french military victories", "weapons of mass destruction", various bits on "SCO" etc) . Funny - but not relevant. This appears to be more ethical way than using black hat tricks, but its just a matter of time before black blog tricks gain popularity.

By saying blogs will be deleted I dont mean they will disappear completely - but it might be for the best to separate blogs from WWW pages in the same way as Newsgroups were separated.

>Blogs are usually more relevant and contain the
>information you are actually looking for, so is not that
>the point of a search engine?

Indeed the point of a good search engine is to provide most relevant results. However I am not convinced that blogs are somehow more relevant. It might be the case for some queries (and people!) but it may not be the case for others.

regards

Alex

We're always happy to try experimenting on ourselves - if we're going to try and talk about best practice online marketing then we reckon the best way is to do it yourself and learn. Hence our little experiment with blogging.

The idea is primarily to drive increased interaction between our many users (the famous 'community' aspect) many of whom have very valuable and interesting things to say. Also, as Tristam's blog points out the content from blogs can rank well in the search engines and hence drive relevant traffic.

To prove the point, if you search Google or Yahoo!, our two biggest referrers,  on "blogs search rankings" you get:

• Google
• Yahoo!

Ashley

On 09:11:35 2 June 2004 TristamBielecki wrote:

Blogs perform better in search rankings than commercial websites.