Google Blog Search ranking explained

Bill Slawski at SEO by the Sea has an interesting post which gives an insight into how Google's Blog Search ranks its results. He has come across a patent application by Google which explains some of the ranking factors.

The patent application, 'Ranking Blog Documents', shows how Google ranks blogs according to searchers' queries based upon a combination of relevance and quality scores.

Positive ranking factors include:

• How many blogrolls list the blog - especially from high-quality blogrolls or blogrolls of respected bloggers.
  
  
• Links from other sources - including mail and chats.
  
  
• How well tags are used to categorize a post.
  
  
• PageRank
  
  
• The number of subscribers to your blog feed -  using data gathered from feed readers.
  
  
• Clicks in search results.
  

Factors which may have a negative effect on ranking:

• Automated posting - an anti-spam measure.
  
  
• Different content between the site and the feed - an indication of a low quality/spam blog.
  
  
• The amount of duplicate content. 
  
  
• Using words and phrases that appear frequently in spam blogs.
  
  
• Posts that have identical size.
  
  
• Linking to a single web page -  "If the number of links to any single external site exceeds a threshold, this can be a negative indication of quality of the blog document."
  
  
• The location/quantity of ads - if ads are seen in the recent posts of a blog, they could be considered a negative quality factor.
  

blog@e-consultancy.com

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