How Google Ranks Blogs

Google Blog Search is a new tool that is gaining popularity on the Internet lately. The Blog Search might also be a good source of visitors if your blog rank on the first positions for specific keywords, but what factors does Google take into account to elaborate the search results?

The “Seo by the Sea” blog has an interesting article analyzing a new patent from Google that contains some indicators about the positive and negative factors affecting blog ranking, check it out:

Positive Factors:

Popularity of the blog (RSS subscriptions)
Implied popularity (how many clicks search results get)
Inclusion in blogrolls
Inclusion in “high quality” blogrolls
Tagging of posts (also from users)
References to the blog by sources other than blogs
Pagerank

Negative Factors:

Predictable frequency of posts (short bursts of posts might indicate spam)
Content of the blog does not match content of the feed
Content includes spam keywords
Duplicated content
Posts have all the same size
Link distribution of the blog
Posts primarily link to one page or site

Daniel Scocco on March 21, 2007 Subscribe to our RSS Feed

Bookmark

9 Responses to “How Google Ranks Blogs”

jpmelos on March 21st, 2007 6:56 pm

Where’s the point in the “Negative factor” of “Posts have all the same size”? If they want find spam and/or duplicate content, they should analyze content instead of size… That sounds too obvious to me…
Manta SEO Solutions on March 21st, 2007 11:31 pm

very interesting points. I guess the positive factors all rely on how well you’ve marketed your blog. The age of you blog plays a role too but I guess that the quality of your content is most important which should help with getting your blog “blogrolled” much quicker.

If people like your content, then they’ll bookmark it o link to it…
Daniel on March 22nd, 2007 1:53 am

I also find not complete clear 2 negative factors, the post size and the frequency of posts. Most established blogs have a very predictable post frequency, just like spam blogs… so I can’t see how they are going to figure the difference.
Manta SEO Solutions on March 22nd, 2007 2:07 am

I cannot see that either. I agree with you and jpmelos. The content is much more important to evaluate. The size or frequency aspect makes no sense to me.
Bes Z on March 22nd, 2007 5:56 am

Interesting points Daniel. I was wondering about 2 of the positive things:

1 : RSS Subscriptions : Do you know how does Google access this information? Is it counting the number of hits to the internal RSS feeds on a site, or does it have access to the information by RSS services like Feedburner?

2 : Tagging of posts from users : Does Google have a way to find out whether or not a site/blog allows readers to add tags to a post? Also, do you know of a way to allow users to add tags to a site? I am using the UTW plugin, and as far as I know, it allows only site/blog owners with WP admin area access to add tags to a post.

Thanks for sharing.
Daniel on March 22nd, 2007 6:48 am

Bes,

1. I think Google uses the data from Google Reader and Google Personalized homepage and extrapolate the results.

2. I was curious about this one as well. Pehaps Google considers not only the tags present on your blog but also tags on other posts that are linkind to your blog.

I am not sure how one would implement a “tagging” system to allow users to tag your stuff, and I am not sure if that would be a good thing either
Genevieve Netz on March 23rd, 2007 9:46 am

I assume on the tagging that they are talking about del.icio.us tags and such that point to your blog.
Awais Muneer on March 1st, 2008 10:01 am

my mind speak peak ,if u want some get some