Blogs and SEO

April 15, 2009

Hi Jill,

I am a long-time reader of your newsletter and really enjoy it (I learn something new each time).

I have a question regarding blogs. I want to add a blog to my site as a tool to keep my customers updated. I also want to use it to improve my ranking and show that my site is an active one. I am currently using Google's Blogger to test the water and haven't connected it to my site yet.

My question is: How does Google know that the blog is part of my website if the address isn't under my website address or hosted by my server? It isn't under www.mysite.com but is mysite.blogspot.com.

Your input is much appreciated.

Sincerely,

Lisa

++Jill's Response++

Hi Lisa,

Glad you enjoy the newsletter!

In reference to your question, Google doesn't know that your blog is part of your website, because it isn't. But don't worry, Google isn't supposed to know stuff like that. All they know how to do is follow links and determine relevancy. They don't attempt to determine ownership because that's not important.

Hope this helps!

Jill

++Follow-up Question++

Jill,

Thanks for getting back to me. That makes sense, but does it then help my site ranking in any way, or am I better off just creating a static html archive and adding to it on a regular basis?

Lisa

++Jill's Response++

Hi Lisa,

I think you're perhaps confused by having heard some old myths that blogs and fresh content somehow magically help rankings. Nothing helps your "site" ranking as a whole. Every page is judged on its own merits. Adding new content to a website doesn't provide you with any special rankings boost, it just keeps the search engine spiders coming around often so they can index the new stuff.

This question comes up so often that it's been part of our SEO FAQ for years:

Should I create a blog for SEO purposes?

This is not to say that a blog isn't helpful. If you create one as a helpful resource for your site visitors, it can also help for SEO purposes because you can link from your blog posts to other pages on your site – thus helping those pages' link popularity – and perhaps ultimately their rankings. But even better than using your blog to link to your own stuff, if you write amazing content on your blog and get the word out about it, other bloggers are apt to link to your posts.

Make sense?

Jill

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Madeline said:
Dear Jill:

In your last newsletter regarding blog and blog links you say " If you create one (blog) as a helpful resource for your site visitors, it can also help for SEO purposes because you can link from your blog posts to other pages on your site – thus helping those pages' link popularity"

If your blog address is part of your website like www.yourwebsite.com/blog even though it was created in blogger.com, would the links from your postings back to the pages on your website be considered within website links? Would the within website links increase your link popularity?
I have not done any postings for a long time because I did not notice any improvement as a result of doing regular news postings

Jill said:
Hi Madeline,

Links from within your own site are fine and helpful, in terms of how Google's PageRank algorithm works. Each page is judged on its own merits (it's number of links and quality of those links) whether it's from your own domain or another domain.

1DMF said:
If a blog resides on your domain, do the links not count as internal rather than external.

Is it not considered that internal links are less juicy?

Thus does ownership of the blog not become part of the mix?

Jill said:

Is it not considered that internal links are less juicy?

Correct. It is not. Of course, if ALL your links were only from your own site(s) it could be a problem.

Gloria Reibin said:
I have a WordPress blog on Internet Promotion. It is updated frequently and has some high quality stuff on it, but I have 0 renking and am not getting many visitors. I understand to get visitors you need to have one way links coming into you from high ranking websites. Any suggestions on how to go about doing this?

Link Building Forum said:
First, you have to have something worth linking to, and then you have to get the word out about it to those who would be most inclined to do so.

There's a lot of linking info at the High Rankings Forum link building area.

Jill

Blogs and SEO

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