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March 2, 2005

Will Blogs Still Matter When Everyone Has One?

Nick at ThreadWatch has a post about the enormous interest in Blogs at the current SES conference in New York.

I get questions every day from people asking me how to use blogs to optimize their search engine ranking. I tell them that blogs can be a useful tool, but are an enormous commitment, and are almost useless if you aren't consistently producing good content.

Still, I think we're about to see an explosion in trackback spam from millions of mediocre "blogs" before this whole furor dies down.

For anyone who's wondering how blogs can help your site to rank better in the search engines, here's the executive summary:

Blogs tend to do very well in the search engines for a variety of reasons. First, their content is updated frequently, sometimes several times a day. Search engines like to see lots of fresh content, and will tend to spider your blog on a regular basis. Also, good blogs tend to attract a lot of traffic, because people want to read what's posted in those blogs. These same people will often write about what's covered in your blog (if it's good) and link back to you. Under most blog posts you'll see a link entitled "trackbacks". Clicking this link will show you all the people who have linked to that particular blog post.

Blog can be a great way to generate a high traffic, high link popularity page, which can then be used to channel some of that traffic and link popularity into your company's website. Good blogs tend to pick up traffic and links pretty fast, and get indexed frequently, but you've got to put a lot of work into making it interesting, so that people read it and link to it. Not such an easy thing to do.

One trick to getting lots of links to your blog is to use trackbacks, where you write blog posts, and in them include links to other popular blogs. You'll then get a trackback link from those blogs, as I mentioned above.

Of course, many popular blogs (such as the SearchEngineWatch blog), are using the new "nofollow" tag on their trackback pages in order to cut back on trackback spam. You can't expect much of a link popularity boost from those pages, but they still can send you traffic.

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