When is a blog not a Blog ? Answer – When it’s owned by Google
I have been noticing some odd results recently on the search results on Google in relation to Blogs. Results, which on closer inspection, made me wonder if, in googles eyes, all blogs were created equal. Which, in turn, led me to question, what is a blog ?
It is a very important question indeed. As more and more webmasters use the power of authoring software like WordPress, hosted on their own space and domain, to create websites rather than ‘blogs’.
The power, adaptability and expandability of blogging software, like WordPress, have made it harder to differentiate between blogging software and Content Management Systems (CMS) (like Joomla).
In-fact WordPress powered sites now sport forums, link directories and advanced Social network interaction plugins from the likes of Gigya Socialize, Socialize and DISQUS Comment System. For all their ‘blogging origins’ they are now, without a doubt, full blown CMS systems. Which leads nicely to the question of how sites created in the traditional way or the blogging software way are viewed in the eyes of the great God Google.
As those of you who keep an eye out for developments in the land of Google are aware, certain changes have been made to the advanced search options. Most notably (for this article at least) the options of blog search and time limited searches. The first of these means that Google must attach a ‘this is a blog’ tag to – well, as you can see, the next word could be either article or blog. Article or blog ? Does it depend on the software that created it ? Or whether the subject is ‘what my cat eat for dinner’ or ‘microsoft chairman resigned today’ perhaps. Do websites like the BBC News and CNN have more in common with blogs than they have in common with Amazon.com and Microsoft.com ?
A big difference between blogs and ‘websites’ is the pinging function, or it was, which notifies a new post being made to lots of different places, which in turn gets picked up by Google and leads to the post being included on Googles index in under an 2 hours (I will return to the ‘under 2 hours bit later). Now, of course you can ‘ping’ a change for website sitemaps to the search engines as well. Although it may take weeks to get included and updated. So in this case blogging software wins. Indeed, if you want to get on Google the quick way, start a blog on Blogger or WordPress.com and your post will be indexed in a matter of hours (It works I have done this as a test).
So, is it worth building a website at all? It takes weeks / months for a new website to be built and to get indexed (and even then it may get sandboxed – if sandboxing exists) and even then only 1 or 2 pages get indexed. In the same time you could have posted everything via a wordpress blog and have hundreds of posts making you money via adsense.
The next question is the big one. Does Google index differently for articles created by blogging software?
In order to discover this out I posted the same article on a website as well as a couple of blog sites. The first hosted on a privately owned domain took 2 days to be indexed (before you ask, yes it was pinging all the major ping services) and the post only appeared on the advanced ‘blog’ search (it has as yet to appear on the main search results) The second appeared in under 2 hours AND incredibly also appeared on the main ’show all results’. It was posted on Blogger, a part of Google land.
Want a way to get your info on Google ? By all means have your own website or blog. BUT, in the meantime, why not take advantage of the uncompetitive practices Google is using and open a Blogger account today.
