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How Google Blog Search ranks blogs

Google BlogRank“Unlike most blog search engines, Google Blog Search ranks the results by relevancy,” per Ionut Alex. Chitu at Google Operating System (Unofficial news and tips about Google). This gives you the most significant blog posts about a topic.

And per Bill Slawski who cites Google’s pending patent application, Google Blog Search ranks blogs based upon a combination of relevance scores and quality scores.

Bill’s post goes into great detail on each scoring item, but here’s a summary grid put together by Ionut Alex. Chitu.

Google BlogRank
Positive Signals Negative (Spam) Signals
Links from blogrolls (especially from high-quality blogrolls or blogrolls of “trusted bloggers”) Posts added at a predictable time
Links from other sources (mail, chats) Different content between the site and the feed
Using tags to categorize a post The amount of duplicate content
PageRank Using words/n-grams that appear frequently in spam blogs
The number of feed subscriptions (from feed readers) Posts that have identical size
Clicks in search results Linking to a single web page
‘ A large number of ads
‘ The location of ads (“the presence of ads in the recent posts part of a blog”)

Bill concedes that Google probably looks at other criteria and may not consider all of the above. However, he believes the above criteria provide good insight into how things work at what is becoming the most popular blog search.

Note that we’re talking Google Blog Search, not Google’s general search engine. Google Blog Search is generally used to locate blogs and blog posts and then to set up RSS feeds of the search results to one’s newsreader.

Source on post: Steve Rubel

  • http://www.binarylaw.co.uk/ Nick Holmes

    Do you know the numbers on how many use Google Blogsearch?
    In a blog readership study conducted by online market research service Vizu Answers and Advertising Age, when asked how they find the blogs they read, 67.3% follow links from other blogs. Recommendations on blogs (22.9%) are ranked higher than finding links on search engines (19.6%).
    This confirms my experience. It is far more productive to find blogs by “networking” using blogrolls, Technorati etc than to spend time on Goog Blogsearch.

  • http://kevin.lexblog.com Kevin OKeefe

    Do not know numbers on Google Blog Search nor on Google on general search. Do know number of users now exceeds those using Technorati, the largest until earliest this year.
    I am aware of that study amd blogged it a couple weeks ago. Very important findings as to why it’s important to blog about content published by other bloggers. But to fill one’s newsreader with RSS feeds, where do you start? Google Blog Reader and Technorati.
    Use of these blog search engines doesn’t stop with finding blogs to subscribe to. You also use them to do searches of key phrases and keywords and then subscribe to those searches so the results are fed by RSS to your newsreader. The number of people using Google Blog Reader and Technorati for these purposes is huge and getting larger by the day.