What Corporate Websites Can Learn From Blogs About Search Ranking
Category: Navel Gazing...
Posted Thursday, January 08, 2004 at 08:58 AM [GMT-6]

There's been a lot of talk lately about how blogs are ruining search results. It's all anecdotal, with little actual research to back up those claims. Until now, that is.

In the latest issue of Digital Web Magazine, Brandon Olejniczak introduces us to a project undertaken by Microdoc News to test the premise that "personal websites" are disproportionately represented in Google search results.

Microdoc's researchers did 5,000 searches on Google using words and phrases from AllTheWeb's "Recent Queries" page (Google has no similar report), then counted the number of blogs which appeared in the top 5 and top 10 results. The outcome was not surprising, at least not to me. In this survey, blogs appeared in the top 5 less than 2% of the time, and in the top 10 less than 3% of the time.

In addition, in an admittedly subjective bit of analysis, blogs which appeared high in the rankings were deemed to "add value" to the search results almost 84% of the time.

The results are interesting and I recommend reading the short report linked above. But I want to return to Brandon's DigitalWeb article, because he makes an excellent point which from a design perspective is really more important than the issue of whether blogs are overrepresented in search engine results. His point is that if blogs are well represented, it's because of their inherent design strengths and not because of any weakness in search engine methodology.

Most blogs are simply oozing with the characteristics that search engines find attractive: frequent updates, clean layout, text-heavy, non-Flash/non-PDF content, meaningful headings and titles and focused articles. A blogging template is a virtual pheromone to a search engine spider.

This isn't rocket science, folks, yet these simple rules are consistently ignored by many (MANY!) otherwise savvy commercial websites. The lesson is simple: if you want to get better search rankings, be more like a blog. Brandon goes so far as to suggest that perhaps more corporate sites should use blogging tools for their websites. I don't think I'd go that far, but the blogging templates do offer some easy and practical guides for search engine optimization.

If you're a corporate designer and you don't know how to take advantage of these resources, there are plenty of us out here in the blogosphere who can show you how to do it. And, for the most part, our consulting fees are quite reasonable: just spend an little time and read!