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Blogging and Google

15 February 2005, by Jonathan Malone

Blogging and search engines go hand in hand. And when I say search engines I basically mean Google. Google is the No.1 search engine in the world, both in terms of size, and popularity. You’re an internet user… what search engine do you use? Chances are it’s Google.

So why does Google love blogging so much? The answer to that lies in two words. The first is content, and the second is links.

Content

Blogs get updated—well most of them do. Some get updated dozens of times a day, and that means one thing… Fresh content, and lots of it. One particular fellow who updates dozens of times a day is called Robert. Try a search for Robert on Google, and take a look at the No. 1 result. Robert de Niro perhaps? Robert Redford? Ahh… Robert Burns?

Er… no actually. It’s a guy called Robert Scoble, a software evangelist at Microsoft, and a daily blogger.

(Ed - Actually, Robert Scoble’s Google result varies between 1—3, but you get the point.)web. Without them there would be no such thing. Think about that for a minute.

The reason they are so special to Google is because Google counts a link in to a site, as a vote for that site, and therefore ranks it higher in their results pages. Blogs get a lot of incoming links because of the community they attract. A community is attracted by regularly updated content.

The ultimate proof

In June last year, some ’search engine optimisation’ (SEO) professionals launched the SEO Challenge, a contest to see who could get the No. 1 result in Google for the (previously unlinked) phrase
Nigritude Ultramarine.

All the top SEO people began using their ‘methods’ and ‘tricks’ for achieving high ranks in Google, with the hope of gaining untold respect and some nice shiny prizes. However, with just a few days of the contest still to run, blogger Anil Dash joined the fray and promptly wiped the floor with everyone else.

Anil has been writing on his blog since mid 1999 and has thousands of entries, thousands of incoming links, and thousands of readers.

All he had to do was write a little piece about the contest and get his mates to link to it. Anil has a lot of mates, and with their help he proved that popular and regular content will shine through everything else in Google.

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