What does BLOG stand for?
OK, I can’t trick you guys - anybody reading this blog knows that blog is really short for weblog. Search engine optimizers (SEO’s), however, often joke that BLOG stands for “Better Listings On Google” (see here, here and here). Because of the nature of a blog (it is frequently updated, it tends to create a community, etc.), this is usually the case. In fact here at Sewell we recently launched a blog because it would hopefully give us some traffic and give us another way to help out our customers and potential customers.
Over the past few days, however, I have been thinking about the effectiveness of blogging and why the search engines seem to like them so much. Of course a huge factor is the fact that a blog is generally updated much more frequently than a website, but this can’t be the only thing launching blogs to the top of the search engine results page (SERPs). The more I think about it the more I realize how different blog technology is than the underlying technology used on the majority of websites. Here are two differences that I have found that I think an alternate content management system (CMS) could address, such as a really good shopping cart software (you listening Monster Commerce?).
The way blogs are indexed vs. traditional websites
The way the majority of blog search engines identify which pages to visit seems much more efficient than the way the major search engines index the internet. With Google, for example, I create a new page and wait (and pray) that the googlebot will find my new page on it’s next crawl. The way that it finds the page is that I link to my new page from a page that I know is already indexed by Google. This is a pretty good way to index the internet when you are indexing 20 billion or so pages, but is this still going to work when the internet is comprised of a trillion or more pages? It doesn’t seem scalable.
I know what you’re thinking - Google has partially addressed this problem with Sitemaps. Basically you can generate an XML snapshot of your page that Google can look at to determine if you have any new pages (or content on existing pages) that it needs to index. This is evidence to me that Google is being forward-looking and anticipates a problem down the road. Wouldn’t it be great, though, if we had a killer search engine that human-edited your initial submission to the directory (much like the DMOZ) that you could then ping everytime you created a new page? Content would be fresher and the bots wouldn’t have to do nearly as much work. This would require some collaboration between the search engine and CMS developers, but I don’t think it’s out of the question. (As a side note, CMS developers, could you make it easy to export your entire product catalog to the popular comparison shopping engines?)
Blog software is simple to make SEO friendly
About three months ago I was testing just about any CMS I could get my hands on trying to find something that was easy to make SEO friendly. To illustrate my point, click here and look at the URL in the address bar. See how easy that is to understand? It just takes the words in the title and separates them with a hyphen removing any punctuation. This is the kind of thing the search engines like to see. Most search engines will index pages using ugly queries (see this), but you are rewarded for having keywords in your URL so it is nice to have the plain english.
If anybody knows of a non-blog CMS that will address this problem I welcome the tip, but I could not get any of them to work. I did find about three that claimed to do this, but they all had notes in the readme saying the functionality had been disabled. I know that sometimes it requires you to tweak your .htaccess file, but this isn’t hard to do and a lot of people are doing it with blogs so it is definitely possible.
I understand that there will always be differences between what I refer to as the normal internet and the blogosphere such as frequent updates and more of a community feel, but I also think that there are things that CMS’s aren’t addressing that would allow online retailers to continue to enjoy high rankings with the onslaught of millions of blogs competing for the same space. What do you think? Do you think what we have is adequate? Am I being idealistic in my approach?
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[…] What does BLOG stand for? Filed under:marketing — admin @ 6:47 pm […]
Pingback by The Preston Blog » What does BLOG stand for? — October 4, 2005 @ 9:25 pm
[…] Google’s Jagger update is probably the most drastic update we have seen in at least a year or so - a lot of people claim that Page Rank doesn’t make a big difference in the traffic you will see coming to your website, but that simply isn’t true - there is a strong correlation between a site’s Page Rank and the attainability of certain keywords and phrases in Google - of course there is more to the equation than having a high PR (keyword density, SEO-friendly URL’s, etc.), but it is definitely a significant factor. […]
Pingback by The Preston Blog - An internet marketing blog for internet retailers » Google’s “Jagger” Update — October 25, 2005 @ 8:48 am