Why Blogs Don’t Rank Well In Google? RSS Readers Mean More Than Backlinks!
Our blogs have never ranked well in Google and I am going to tell you why!
I have been chasing Google for months. Adding social bookmarks, requesting links, optimizing posts, titles and incoming links. It finally dawned on me in the wee hours of saturday morning what I have been doing wrong and I have been up all night changing my ways.
Now I am going to share it with you. This is good stuff stay with me here.
If any part of this article has mispellings, bad coding or just sounds like I have been up for a day and a half it’s because it is true. I have been implementing everything I have learned here. And this is POWERFUL!
Here’s how Google ranks blogs, they call it “popularity of the blog document”.
Here is how Google ranks blogs….
- By the number of blog readers you have in Google Reader and Technorati.
- By how many blogrolls you are in and the quality of the linking blog.
- How many times your Google search engine listing is clicked.
- Social bookmarketing posts and the nember of times you are Dugg ect.
- The number of times your URL appears in conversations, think Gmail.
“The popularity of the blog document may be a positive indication of the quality of that blog document. A number of news aggregator sites (commonly called “news readers” or “feed readers”) exist where individuals can subscribe to a blog document (through its feed). Such aggregators store information describing how many individuals have subscribed to given blog documents. A blog document having a high number of subscriptions implies a higher quality for the blog document. Also, subscriptions can be validated against “subscriptions spam” (where spammers subscribe to their own blog documents in an attempt to make them “more popular”) by validating unique users who subscribed, or by filtering unique Internet Protocol (IP) addresses of the subscribers.”
You may want to read how Technorati ranks blogs here.
“Simlarly, the existence of the blog document in a blogroll of a well-known or trusted blogger may also be a positive indication of the quality of the blog document. In this situation, it is assumed that the well-known or trusted blogger would not link to a spamming blogger.”
“An implied popularity may be identified for the blog document. This implied popularity may be identified by, for example, examining the click stream of search results. For example, if a certain blog document is clicked more than other blog documents when the blog document appears in result sets, this may be an indication that the blog document is popular and, thus, a positive indicator of the quality of the blog document.”
“Tagging of the blog document may be a positive indication of the quality of the blog document. Some existing sites allow users to add “tags” to (i.e., to “categorize”) a blog document. These custom categorizations are an indicator that an individual has evaluated the content of the blog document and determined that one or more categories appropriately describe its content, and as such are a positive indicator of the quality of the blog document.”
“References to the blog document by other sources may be a positive indication of the quality of the blog document. For example, content of emails or chat transcripts can contain URLs of blog documents. Email or chat discussions that include references to the blog document is a positive indicator of the quality of the blog document.”
I wish I could say I wrote this, but the quotes are from the Google patent and the article is actually How Google Blogsearch ranks your Posts… In their own words!
What Chris Lang thinks Google does…
I am also thinking that the quality of blogs that you link to in the body text has a lot to do with your blog and your posts’s ranking. I feel that Google thinks if you are unwilling to link to blogs better than yours then you are not sure of your own content.
It is also possible that the number of links in a blog document (or lack of) says to Google that you are just building landing pages that are worthless rather than writing a well researched article using a number of authorative sources as background.
There is also some evidence that Google uses Feedburner stats and Google Analytics metrics as indicators of a blog’s quality. Since Google own’s both services I expect that they do. I will investigate this in my next post.
I am only guessing at this point, but wouldn’t it seem that if all these other things factor into the quality of the document, wouldn’t comments as well?
If I had learned this two years ago I would not know what I know about SEO. The bad news is I would have quadrupled my traffic long ago.
I would not have learned what I know about social marketing.
I would not have forged strategic alliances with major marketers.
I would not have completed and marketed two ebooks that have done well.
I would not have devoured everything Eban Pagan has had to say.
I would not have taken Eban’s advice and gone out and done one on one social marketing consults.
I would not have celebrated the most personal success I have ever had on the Internet.
This is pretty off topic but I have quit chasing money and while I could have rolled this into my social marketing eBook I am passing on information that I feel is extremely powerful and valuable. Either that or you all already know this and I am a jackass.
If that is the case I am ONE HAPPY JACKASS.
Thank you Eban Pagan. I am on the golden path.
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Comment by Anissa — April 12, 2008 @ 8:34 pm
Chris,
Thanks for the tips! Just so happens I found you somewhat by mistake! I am in Jack’s Social Authority, and also his publicist among other things…You know, I knew some of these things, maybe all of them, but when you put it so clear…wow! Ok, I can say that I wouldn’t have thought of the number of times you are clicked in a Google search.
Great Job!!
Thanks!
Anissa
Comment by Warner Carter — April 12, 2008 @ 10:00 pm
thanks for some good info
Comment by Joe — April 12, 2008 @ 10:05 pm
Thanks a lot for this, I have a few blogs and I just started another one to be my main blog. This is great information to know as it differs a lot from what you read and get in various books and courses. So many teach on getting backlinks to boost page rank, but I guess, in a sense, getting on a popular blogger’s blogroll is pretty close to the same thing, but just a little more refined.
thanks a lot for this one, I just stumbled upon it and I am glad I found it.
Comment by Richard McLaughlin — April 13, 2008 @ 5:52 am
Good tips. I also found that using one tag gets better results that long tags. “Business” gets more results than “New Business” and “Internet Marketing” does better than “Internet Marketing with Social Media”. Best results for me have been shorter keyword phrases - the opposite of search engine results.
Not related to this post, but everyone has their very best post. The one you love and wish you could do more for. Go to translate.google.com and put the entire post in a different language and make a second posting on your site in that foreign language, then do some standard SEO and marketing tricks to get it seen. When I had my first search in the Greek language - totally different alphabet - I was thrilled. Now I get them (and for my clients) daily.
Pingback by links for 2008-04-14 | Cosmos — April 13, 2008 @ 6:34 pm
[…] Why Blogs Don’t Rank Well In Google? (tags: blogging) […]
Comment by Jacob Skir — April 14, 2008 @ 1:38 am
Chris,
really I didn’t know they count the number of times my URL appears in conversations.
OK, thanks.
Comment by REBlogGirl — April 14, 2008 @ 8:57 am
I agree with you. The problem in the real estate industry specifically is that a few hundred Realtors with low PR, low authority blogs are linking to one another forming on huge reciprocal link farm - for which they got penalized in the last 2 PR updates. It was brutal. The other concern is that these huge blogrolls on new sites diminish the percentage of local links to outbound links (which are to low quality sites) and they quickly exceed a normal link number on a home page (sites with 300-400 links on a homepage when they are brand new and in the sandbox get flagged for spam - it’s a fact- SEOmoz has written extensively on the topic). Once a site is older and more authoritative, it can carry far more links on the page ad a lager blogroll. But again, you want to see people linking to authority sites not some other low authority Realtor site. So, my assertion that blogrolls suck is dead on for real estate. I have many other blogs that do have blogrolls - becasue I know how to link wisely. But the link farm that is the real estate blogosphere needs to stop.
Read also: Google slaps real estate blogs with reciprocal linking penalty
here are some posts about what happened to Realtors that were indiscriminately linking:
http://www.rsspieces.com/real-estate-blogs-and-reciprocal-linking-penalties-does-google-hate-your-link-love
http://www.rsspieces.com/google-slaps-real-estate-blogs-in-latest-pagerank-update
Comment by Chris Lang — April 14, 2008 @ 9:06 pm
REGBlogGirl,
You are very right, indescriminent linking degrades your PR and how Google ranks blogs.
However, as the Google patent patent in the quotes above, “Simlarly, the existence of the blog document in a blogroll of a well-known or trusted blogger may also be a positive indication of the quality of the blog document. In this situation, it is assumed that the well-known or trusted blogger would not link to a spamming blogger.”
It is not the number of blogrolls you are in, but the quality of the blogs where you appear in blogrolls. Also the quality of the blogs you link to in your blogroll.
Pingback by More on How Google Ranks Blogs — April 15, 2008 @ 1:55 pm
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Comment by Ron Passfield — April 17, 2008 @ 11:08 am
Hi Chris - thanks for sending me the link to this post after visiting my Squidoo lens. This is very useful information that I need to act on. About 12 months ago my blog had a PR5 ranking from Google. Then it dropped to PR3, despite more frequent updating. So your post will come in handy to help me lift my blog’s ranking.
Comment by Affiliate Marketing Guide — April 18, 2008 @ 9:12 am
Thanks for the great info!
I have a lot to think about:-)
Cheers!
Joe
Comment by moserw — May 4, 2008 @ 2:57 am
Thanks for a good post. Very interesting points raised that have got me thinking about making changes in my blog. Not sure I agree with RSS feeds deciding on ranking though. Still will apply and check out all the points listed here.
Comment by Bradley Hart — May 5, 2008 @ 1:43 am
Hey Chris thanks for the comments over on BlogBoy and the link to here. I am not sure the number of comments one has really affects your pagerank, or atleast not on the low end of the scale it doesn’t seem too. My blogs with the most comments didn’t move at all. This could be because they are both fairly new (both less than a month), but the blog that went from 0 to 4 didn’t have very many comments at all. What does seem to matter most in this latest round of rankings from what I have been able to tell is tagging. Almost everyone I talked to that jumped from 0 to 4 tag the hell out of their posts.
Pingback by Google Reader Adds Friends List, Sharing, Bookmarking and Blog Recommendation Engine — August 17, 2008 @ 9:21 am
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