Why Google Loves Weblogs?
Reason One: Google Loves the Links in Weblogs
A match made in heaven! Google loves links, and weblogs are all about links! Every time a blogger links to a website, its Google rank increases. If enough bloggers pile onto that link, it can start to have a significant impact on a sites’ Google rank. But links by themselves aren’t enough to give Weblogs their influence on Google. That comes from a more recent tweak in the Google search engine:
Reason Two: Google loves Fresh Content
Google frequently updated sites much more often on their index. The primary reason for this was to increase Google’s access to articles from news sites, like CNN and the New York Times. Google even added a “News” section at the top of its search results, to present “news stories relevant to users’ queries”. [2]
But Google didn’t stop there. Its “insatiable appetite for fresh content spilled over to any frequently updated websites, including Weblogs.” If Google noticed a page updating frequently, it started visiting that page much more frequently so it could suck the latest content into its database of over 3 billion documents. As they put it in their latest press release, “Google refreshes millions of web pages every day to ensure that Google users have access to the most current information.”
Putting it Together: Google loves Weblogs
Weblogs are perfect for Google: frequently updated websites are full of links. It’s no wonder that Google loves Weblogs so much. Of course, if that’s the case, why doesn’t every Google search land the searcher on a blog? That question underscores a crucial point about weblogs and Google: weblogs are the voters in this political system. In other words, weblogs don’t get elected by Google… but the sites they voted for do.
So even if you never visit a blog, you’re being influenced by them. The collective votes of the weblog community are determing what sites you see on Google, the world’s largest search engine.
The Google Power of weblogs will only grow with time. As weblogs get more traffic, their votes will count for more: Google weights fresh votes more than older votes. Blog search engines like Daypop and blogdex are spreading links more quickly. As weblogs get more traffic, their votes will count for more. Not only do their votes count for more as they each get more traffic, but the heavy cross-linking magnifies the impact of this collective voting machine. This greatly magnifies the Google Power of weblogs.
Weblogs: They ain’t no Fad
Even if you’ve never heard of weblogs, they’re having a powerful impact on your web searches every day. So to answer the New York Times, are weblogs just a fad? Anything that can potentially influence over a billion web searches every week sounds like more than a fad to me.
What does everyone think? Are weblogs a fad?