What is a blog?

[l234244]

Hello all, can someone explain clearly what exactly a blog is? I came across a site - http://www.boingboing.net/ - Pagerank 8 - without being anything to special. In this case is it worth starting a blog to get a link from a high pagerank site?

Cheers

Michael

Sea Fishing Rigs (http://www.seafishingrigs.co.uk)

[seokid]

I wouldn't say I can clearly explain it but I'll give it my best. A blog is section on a person's website similar to a forum. ahh forget it, this is what google had to say:

"A blog is basically a journal that is available on the web. The activity of updating a blog is "blogging" and someone who keeps a blog is a "blogger." Blogs are typically updated daily using software that allows people with little or no technical background to update and maintain the blog. Postings on a blog are almost always arranged in cronological order with the most recent additions featured most prominantly. " - Google

They're quite a bit like a forum, you can make posts from anywhere in the world if you have an internet connection.

Not all blogs require you to sign in, so some people will do a search for them and try to make a post with the "your name" box as the keywords they are trying to get rankings on. Most blogs have a section for your website, which gets linked to from the blog with your name as the anchor text. People will make bogus posts just to get the link. Most blog owners don't like this and will just delete your post once they find it.

I simply don't recommend this unless you have the owners permission to post.

[complainer]

I would add that typically a blog is written by one person (sometimes a few), so it is more like a newspaper or magazine, though some will let you post comments. A forum, such as this one, allows most people to post as equals. From an SEO standpoint this is a huge advantage. For example, right now I am generating content for seo-guy.com. If his site were instead a blog, most of the posts would be done by him or just a few others, and so it would be much more difficult to generate the same amount of content.

I would also add that there's a little bit of a stigma to blogs -- most of them don't come across as very professional (from a content, not necessarily appearance, perspective) so a blog could make an otherwise quality web site look a little amatuerish.

To get a feel for what a blog is, go to weblogs.com. It lists which blogs have just been updated (there are dozens every minute) and you can just pick some at random to look at.

[l234244]

I think i'm beggining to understand about blogs. However a quick search gives blogs with extremely high pageranks. two questions on this:

1) How do these sites reach so high page rank?

2) Is it worth making a blog related to your website, thus using anchor text to link to homepage plus internal pages?

In other words I'm asking whether or not google can distinguish between a website and a blog, and if it can does it follow them links?

cheers

Michael

[Brendon]

Hello Michael

I've used a blog on my home page - www.tailored.com.au - for a year or so now and the search engines like it very much. They index the blog every day or so and we've generated quite a few visitors because of the content of the blog.

We have also started adding blogs to client sites with some solid results as well. (not only in search engine rankings, but because people like seeing fresh content).

I'm no expert of the PageRank issues (our page rank is only 5, we have plenty of half-decent links) and if the blog impacts on that significantly (or how) I'm not too sure. My gut feeling is that because of the frequently updated content we may receive some PR boost.

Hope that is of some use.

[seokid]

If you have a blog it's also very easy to get it listed in a lot of high PR blog directories. This can then also be used to pass up to your index page. There are tons of blog directories, just do a search for them in google and you should be able to get some PR pretty quick. hhmm... idea brewing...

[disgust]

not only that, but other blog users tend to exchange links (and give out free links) like crazy to other blogs.