Improving Your Rank in Google Blog Search

Posted on March 21, 2007

Google Operating System has a very interesting post about how Google Blog Search ranks search results. They found the information in a patent filed by Google. These are some of the positive things that can help your blog rank better in Google Blog Search.

links from blogrolls (especially from high-quality blogrolls or blogrolls of "trusted bloggers")
links from other sources (mail, chats)
using tags to categorize a post
PageRank
the number of feed subscriptions (from feed readers)
clicks in search results

The negative things that can hurt your blog's ranking in Google Blog Search are spam indicators like duplicated content, spammy keywords and adding posts at a predictable time. Having very few feed subscribers or no little on important blog rolls would also be a negative.

The patent itself is worth reading. Scroll down the part that says "Determining a Quality Score for a Blog Document." For example, Google does not just look at the number of feed subscribers. They also take a very close look at the number of individual feed subscribers in an attempt to help rule out spam blogs.

The popularity of the blog document may be a positive indication of the quality of that blog document. A number of news aggregator sites (commonly called "news readers" or "feed readers") exist where individuals can subscribe to a blog document (through its feed). Such aggregators store information describing how many individuals have subscribed to given blog documents. A blog document having a high number of subscriptions implies a higher quality for the blog document. Also, subscriptions can be validated against "subscriptions spam" (where spammers subscribe to their own blog documents in an attempt to make them "more popular") by validating unique users who subscribed, or by filtering unique Internet Protocol (IP) addresses of the subscribers.

Google Operating System says Google develops a relevance score called an IR score to rank search results.

To rank the search results, Google combines a quality score obtained by mixing those signals with a relevance score (IR score) that depends on the query. "The IR score may be determined based on the number of occurrences of the search terms in the document. The IR score may be determined based on where the search terms occur within the document (e.g., title, content, etc.) or characteristics of the search terms (e.g., font, size, color, etc.). A search term may be weighted differently from another search term when multiple search terms are present. The proximity of the search terms when multiple search terms are present may influence the IR score." (the quote was slightly altered for clarity)

If you can improve your inbound links and feed subscribers these are two things that will probably boost your blog's rank in Google Blog Search. A lot of times people are searching Google Blog Search for recent posts (which are sorted by date) so blogging frequently about current issues is also helpful.