#5 SEO Myth

January 2, 2007

#5 SEO Myth

The Continuing Series; Realty Search Engine Optimization Myths:
The engines love blogs more than regular webpages

For our discussion Google, Yahoo, and MSN are primarily Search Engines. When we discuss search, we mean the main SERPS. Not Google Blog Search, Yahoo News, or any Image or Video site.

The big prize is still overwhelmingly from the main search.

Let's look at what gets a search engine spider to visit a page.

Updates
Newly Fresh Pages
Growing Content
And most importantly Links

In the eyes of Google you can update all day long and if you do not have valuable citations (links), your page does not exist.

At the end of the day, a page is a page is a page. The engine can care less if it is a blog. It is just more text for them to index.

So why did this myth come about?

Well for one, a blog is set up to be somewhat search engine friendly. Somewhat.

If set up properly it also can auto ping directories, and services like Technorati. So you get some backlink love almost immediately.

Blog and Ping

All that to get indexed in the engines!

The myth started from the fast indexing result of blogging and pinging. So bloggers in the know would post blogs-usually worthless or auto posted- several times a day, and point to their real website from a post. This was to get the Engine spiders who often visit the ping services to follow over to your blog, and then over to your site for quick indexing.

Like many exploits this technique was abused and therefore is not as useful anymore. The pinging services are more stingy than they used to be about visiting, and the social sites tend to not pass on link value anymore.

Not that it is not useful, it just isn't as glorious a technique as it once was.

From a search engine perspective, a blog is a great tool to get traffic that comes from posts that are consistent and targeted phrases. As I have said many times a blog forces us to do what we should have done long ago. Update our website!