Prominent liberal blogger Markos Moulitsas Zúniga, who runs one of the most popular liberal and progressive blogs in the world, says Google News is becoming unusable.
“They need some serious soul-searching about what they are and what their mission is.”
“A news operation needs to present news, and credible news at that. That means get rid of the blogs (mostly opinion), get rid of the no-name sites, the conspiracy sites, and the rest of that crap.”
Obviously, he wasn’t the first. I mean, how many times have you googled around lately to find informations about X events, or Y products or Z services and get personal web blogs on the top ten of the results?
I personally do not have any problem with that, since people don’t read average web blog, and Google algorithm has ensured that only those of really important websites will show up at the top results.
That means, if you really want to get informations about something that also includes what most people think as important too.
The How
The interesting question is how web blogs can do that. In my experience running this blog, i can see easily that web blogs possess many qualities that search engines like Google and Yahoo really loves to see. They are,
- Frequent updates to content and pages
Blog is used to enable people publishes anything easily on the web in chronological ways. The quality of a blog is sometime determined by how frequent the contents are updated. - Text dominated
Since search engine indexing only works for text, blog entries which usually filled with more text than image become favorable. - Carefully orginized content structure
This due to categorized topic and archival previous entries that come with almost every blog system. And some blog applications like wordpress has great plugins that can create sitemap and submit it automatically to Google. This surely helps search engine spider to crawl blog easily. - Important text wrapped in header elements
It is well known that search engine try to understand a web page by its header elements (meta). Many blog application has this built in features.
- Friendly URL
Using htaccess and some functions to process query string. - Link Management
Search engine like Google has page rank system which calculates the important of a web page by how it links to others and being linked by others. Many blog system has this feature to create link easily and trackback system to notice the owner when his entry being linked by other blog using the same trackback mechanism.
In addition, with many blogs aggregator, blogs search engine and feed syndicator out there makes a web blog easier to get promoted. Sometime even without the owner realizing it.