Blogs have the characteristics that are most valued by the various search engines, including Google. In fact, the very nature of blogs is such, that it almost looks like they were created with the search engines in mind.
Blogs are updated frequently with abundant fresh content, laden with keywords. The result is higher search engine rankings for those searches.
Blogs have a natural affinity for adding incoming links, which helps in raising your Google PageRank (Google's measure of the importance of an internet website), and your placement in the search engine results pages (SERPs).
Those two features alone have some fairly insignificant, in some people’s minds, blogs sitting on the first page for many keywords. Those same blogs boast some high PageRanks as well.
Most of the widely available blog templates are easily read and indexed, when crawled by the various search engine spiders. Many of the various blogging templates include pre-written h1 and h2 (and so on) tags, already in place. Titles are readily employed, as are many other recommended SEO practices.
Blogs are certainly easily optimized, even by novice search engine opimization (SEO) practitioners. That includes most bloggers.
Blogs and incoming links
One of the first things you will notice about most blogs, is they possess vast lists of outgoing links. At first glance, the thought is that these sites are leaking a lot of PageRank. They might be true, although the concept of PageRank leak remains controversial, and unproven to everyone’s satisfaction.
Many of the links you see on the blog are reciprocated. Many are not. The collection of links is not the main goal of most bloggers. The outgoing links are simply there as a service to the readers. There are usually a lot of outgoing links found in the daily blog entries. Again, linking is a prominent feature of the blog. Those are only the links that are leaving the site.
What you don’t see are the links coming into the blog. Bloggers are very heavy linkers. They link to other blogs and websites freely and generously. Concerns about PageRank rarely arise, and is a non-issue to many bloggers.
The focus of the vast majority of blog writers is the reader. If the topic is interesting to the blog owner, it is linked and offered freely to the blog readership.
That free range linking works both ways. Natural incoming links abound. Not all blog links are reciprocal links. On the other hand, bloggers will happily exchange links with other writers, if they find the blog to be an interesting one.
In the blogging community, linking to one another is a very frequent event.
For those who are concerned about reciprocal links being penalized by Google, that has not been a problem thus far for blogs. In fact, a quick backlink check shows abundant reciprocal links. They are not penalized, perhaps, because the links are almost always from the blog home page. Link sections and pages, common for traditional websites, are rarely found on blogs.
Blogs and internet directories
The well known standard internet directories, including DMOZ, Skaffe, and JoeAnt, accept blog submissions without concern.
Among the many directories that include blogs in their listings is The Open Directory Project (DMOZ). That well known and very important directory, has a special weblog section, devoted to various categories of blogs. Over 4000 blogs are already included in DMOZ. Over 4000 blogs are already included in DMOZ.
Following the recent DMOZ data transfer, well over 3000 blogs are now included in the Google Directory as well.
Blogs also have their own exclusive directories. Those special blog directories, as quality backlinks, provide a jump start to your blog’s PageRank. They gladly accept most blog submissions, often without requiring a link back to the directory.
The special blog directories include:
Blog Search Engine
Blogwise
Eatonweb Portal
Blog Universe
Popdex
Blogarama
Blogdex
Globe of Blogs
Blizg
Online Marketing Links
Weblogs Compendium
Octopus Files
Kmax
Open Weblog Directory
Because of the number of quality directories available for all websites, and exclusively for blogs, strong showings of incoming links are a regular blog feature. It’s not unusual for a weblog to have a PageRank of 5 or 6 after only a few months on the internet.
Blogs and content
The search engines love sites that are updated regularly with lots of fresh content. That description matches the description of a weblog. The almost daily addition of content, results in blogs being crawled frequently by the various search engine spiders, including the much sought after Googlebot.
Many bloggers often have specific interests that they write about with passion. Their regular entries are rich with keywords. Combining the heavily keyword filled posts with multiple entries, provides a steady diet of spider food, for the web crawling bots. Those same keywords, entered into a search box, propel a number of blogs to the top of the search returns.
Other bloggers write about what interests them at any particular moment. This group of bloggers also benefits in the search engine results. By touching upon a wide range of topics, their blogs are full of keywords of all sorts. Their free flowing use of keywords, is reflected in the SERPs, with many strong showings in numerous searches.
While other traditional website owners were lamenting the loss of their top rankings, following the recent “Florida” Google update, bloggers were enjoying better SERPs and PageRanks than ever. The heavily content oriented weblogs were treated very well by the Google search results.
Blogs came through the Florida update with flying colors, many proudly displaying high PageRanks, and page one rankings for their most important keyword searches. The new algorithm favored the blog format of freely linking, and frequently updating content.
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