How Google Blog Search ranks blogs
“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.
| 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