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Can anyone tell me about The Google Blogger? What does it do?
Blogger - it's a service that Google bought in mid-Feb 2003, as you might expect from a service called Blogger (www.blogger.com) it provides people with blogs.
More info on the purchase; new.blogger.com/about/blogger_google_faq.pyra
If you don't know what a blog is then I guess you've been somewhere that didn't have the internet for the last year or two; it's very much like a tendy-in-certain-social-groups web-based journal with a lot of social elements attached to it. There are a few higher profile blogs, but the majority are the low-key stereotypical ones I'm about to describe.
If you asked me to quantify a typical blog I'd say introspective/opinionated copy talking about thinks that aren't all that important to someone who doesn't know the author plus links (usually with good anchor text) to things they thought were "neat" or "cool" (which may include other blogs) and of course links to their friends blogs (who normally link back to them).
It's those social elements and their effects on the SERPs (strong anchor text plus lots of valid interlinking) that brought blogs to the attention of a lot of the people here and of course to Google's attention because they were causing mayhem with the PR / link-pop methods that were previously working so well.
Also just noticed this thread [webmasterworld.com] - might be worth a read since it talks about blogs with relation to SEO.
Is it useful for getting a site indexed? I've heard people talk about 'blogging'.
A link is a link I guess and so the standard comments apply - to make a blog an effective SEO/marketing tool you'd need content that people will link to and/or a good social network.
Using blogs for SEO purposes is a technique that's been out of the bag for six months or more so in my estimation that would mean that if it's not dead already it's *definitely* on the radar and is poised to be neuralised in the immediate future.
What are the pros and cons? Has anyone used it for a postive influence with regards to getting back or staying in the SERPS?
There are "pros and cons" as such, it's just another site at the end of the day and so to reap any possible benefits you need to develop it. Also because of the impact that blogs had previously you might find that developing your blog is actually harder than developing your own site.
As for SERPs... just because blogger is owned by google doesn't mean that they'll treat any site you link via that blog as a "must crawl" URL that will get into the SERPs with nice placement and stay there - as far as they are concerned it's just another link.
- Tony
Why should blogs be neutralized? In essence they are web sites like others.
Using blogs for SEO purposes is a technique that's been out of the bag for six months or more so in my estimation that would mean that if it's not dead already it's *definitely* on the radar and is poised to be neuralised in the immediate future.
My use of "neuralised" (perhaps not the best word in hindsight) in this context was meant to denote that it's a known technique that was causing problems with SERPs a while ago (blog bombing?) and so if they haven't done it already, the potential exists for Google to modify the weighting they give to certain aspects of blogs when compared to regular sites.
I'm not an SEO+blog follower so I don't know the ins and outs, I was merely commenting that making the assumption that blog-based SEO is an easier solution to all problems when compared to site-based SEO is probably a flawed conclusion.
- Tony
I agree here. The potential exists. But unlike guest book spamming, blog spamming is not parasitic. Blogs have the same chances as any other web site.
Btw sorry if my quote was incomplete. I assume everyone here is reading all relevant preceding posts to grasp the context.
