How to Make Your Blog Rank Well in Google’s Blog Search Engine

Google’s Blog Search is a blog search engine that indexes your blog posts by crawling XML feeds instead of the actual blog html page. The Blog Search includes all blogs which publishes a site feed: If your blog is not included in the Blog Search, you might want to ping them.

I’ve gotten some traffic from Google’s blog search but I haven’t thought too much about it until I saw a link on Conversion Rater which sent me to an article about search result rankings.

Apparently a new patent application from Google reveals the positive and negative factors which determine how Google Blog Search ranks search results. Bill Slawski at SEO By the Sea goes into greater detail on each factor in his excellent post.

Google’s blog search shows results in responses to searchers queries based upon a combination of relevance scores and quality scores… In addition to a relevance score, the search engine looks at a quality score.

A new patent application from Google discusses possible positive and negative factors that might go into that quality scores that might be used by Google Blog Search, and provides some explanations for each of those factors.

Here is the list of positive and negative factors which determine how you rank in Google’s blog search.

Positive Factors

• 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

Negative Factors

• Posts added at a predictable time




• Different content between the site and the feed




• The amount of duplicate content




• Using words/n-grams that appear frequently in spam blogs




• Posts that have identical size




• Linking to a single web page




• A large number of ads




• The location of ads (”the presence of ads in the recent posts part of a blog”)