14 replies to this topic

[ladybird]

Hi there!

I've been hearing a lot about weblogs/blogs but I'm not really sure what they are or what their implication is for search engine optimisation.

can anyone help me?

[Jill]

Ohhh...one from my SEO FAQ!

++Blogs and Rankings++

Q. This parrot that I talk to in the pet store told me that I should
create a blog for search engine optimization purposes.  Can you speak
to this?

Jill: Blogs have no special powers of high rankings.  What they do
have (if done correctly) is fresh, unique content.  Search engines do
tend to like that, regardless of the format.  If they know any given
site is adding new articles on a frequent basis, they will come around
often to index it.  Blogs are certainly one way of easily adding new
information to your site.  Newsletters archived on your site can
provide a similar benefit, as can archived press releases, or a
popular forum.

You can see all kinds of blogs or get a free one at http://www.blogger.com

[ladybird]

have checked out the site you suggested, but dstill don't quite understand what a blog is.....

[qwerty]

A blog is a web log -- an online journal that's published using software that makes it easy for people whether or not they know anything about HTML. Because they're often updated and allow for a good deal of interactivity -- people can post comments, "trackbacks" can be used to keep track of other blogs linking to them and making references to them -- and because search engine companies have been buying blogging companies or starting their own, many people believe they're going to be very important in SEO. For a few years now, a number of people have been recommending that creating a blog and updating it often is a great way to promote your own site.

In my personal opinion, updating the site itself on a fairly regular basis accomplishes pretty much the same thing, and unless you've got time to work on both your site and your blog, I'd recommend just working on the site.

[Scottie]

What Qwerty said... it's just a way for non-technical people to quickly and easily update a website, as well as allowing other people to contribute comments if they like.

There's nothing magical about it for SEO purposes. But if you are posting to a blog regularly, the search engines have new content to review. It doesn't help any more than just posting new content on your site in any other fashion.

[lisphacker]

I agree with Jill and Qwerty, but would like to add that there are some technical reasons why blogs in particular are so effective SEO-wise. That is, beyond the fact that there exists (presumably) fresh, compelling content.

1. The XML based feed, be it RSS (preferable) or Atom affords a webmaster a variety of benefits, and enhances the value of the HTML portion of a site by supplying robotic agents with a clear, chronological record of changes.
2. Blogs automatically generate new pages every time you post; increased volume is increased opportunity to be found.
3. Blogs automatically interlink everything deeply, and archive everything over time.
4. Blogs automatically facilitate community because of the comment-ability.

Those factors are what makes what I call the "publishing paradigm" so exciting for web authors. People are free to just author content and the blog (as a metaphor for a website or any set of pages) is automatically optimized for search engines, both HTML and XML, automatically. It's a beautiful thing. I've heard blogs refered to as "the new homepages" of the 'net, which takes us back to 1996 or so, except no HTML competency is required to participate anymore, making things a lot more exciting.

[storyspinner]

Can I say I truly love the Blog-o-sphere .. so much fresh new relevant content from great minds!

However one point should be made about blogs - they are Ripe for Spamming and manipulation both with Linking Popularity and content spam blogs.

The engines are trying to control this though, implementing the "no-follow" tag is the first place they've started. But until the blog providers get a good handle on how to prevent "Spam Bots" from creating blogs that are nothing but spam .. there will be some black hat SEO's out there taking full advantage of this medium.

There's been a few articles out there about some blog providers recently revamping systems to stop the spam in the last few days. It'll be interesting to see what Blogger does as well.

[Minerva]

Here's a little blog/search engine observation.

I use GoogleAlerts paid service to track any web mentions of my client's book. The GoogleAlerts are sent to me on Saturday. The last one had a mention of the book in a blog that was just created on Friday, the day before. There was only one post in the brand-new blog. The book title was mentioned in the side bar, not the actual post.

I guess Google spiders blogs pretty quickly!

-Andrea-

[qwerty]

That's pretty quick

Minerva, can you tell us which blog software this one used, and whether it was hosted on its own domain or as a subdomain of the blogging site? Google owns Blogger, and I'd guess (just a guess) that they'd be especially quick to spider a blog at www.someblogname.blogspot.com (blogspot.com is where Blogger blogs are published).

[Minerva]

Bob - it was a Typepad blog, hosted under their domain (blogname.typepad.com).

-Andrea-

[discountdomains]

www.articlealley.com/index_2_13.html contains quite a few articles on blogs if you want to dig around a bit.

Clare

Edited by Jill, 20 May 2005 - 12:06 PM.

[JEET]

I run a blog and my site gets scanned once a week on msn and once in 2 weeks on google, and thats only after 2 months of being online. Even if your site doesnt really have any content to regularly update, its always good to just keep a weblog or something and update it once a week, just having it at ur site can cause search engines to index your site more often.

[Jill]

its always good to just keep a weblog or something and update it once a week, just having it at ur site can cause search engines to index your site more often.

But if you're not updating your site often, then why would you care if the search engines visit your site often?

[JEET]

In the event that you do change something, the changes are quickly reflected in the search engines. Like if you were to add an additional 20 pages to your site or something.

[Jill]

Right, but if you don't naturally add content anyway, and don't have any new stuff that needs to be added, then you really don't care whether the spiders come often. Your stuff will already be in and (ideally) ranking highly.

The worst thing you can do is create content just for contents sake. Meaning if you don't need new content, certainly don't create it just for the search engines.