Blogs and Brandy

Absence of Blogs in Brandy- new Algo or Rollback?

[3rdWaveEd]

Late last year I enjoyed the increased Google focus on blogs, and blog link anchor text.

Now in the Brandy update I see results very similar to pre-Florida with some tweaks, and I know GG has stated this is a new product not a rollback to pre-Florida.

But when I look at the relative absence of Blogs in search results I have to wonder "whassup" with that; the blog aspect of Google seems pre-Florida. Any other observations/thoughts about the status of Blogs in post-Brandy Google?

[theitboy]

Miue's doing just fine - I can't see any difference between changes in my blog's rankings and other Brandy-esque changes.

As with elsewhere, long articles with extensive use of synonyms and related words seem to be doing fine - anchor text and title matches are less than they were pre-Florida.

If anything, I think blogs have advantages in the new algorithm, to whit, a large variety of different anchor text links from a variety of sources, and they generally aren't too niche focussed.

[Chndru]

>relative absence of Blogs in search results

Wait for a blog: type search or a search tab sometime soon :)

[abates]

I've just noticed the snippets/cache for the blog site I use have come back. Interesting :)

[bonnyman]

Google stopped archiving many of the archive pages for my blog, which really became a problem since I had a built-in Google search for people to search old posts.

I switched to a Picolight search tool for my blog to search old posts, but I'm concerned that all the old pages have dropped out of Google's index.

My blog covers news of various community, utility and broadband deployments around the world. In the case of many foreign projects, those old archive pages are the only English language descriptions of those projects. I wouldn't mind low page ranks for those pages -- I'd be happy just to have them in the index.

The blog's current page and recent archive pages are still indexed as are a few older archive pages

My blog is at <snip>

Any suggestions?

Al Bonnyman

[edited by: engine at 5:57 pm (utc) on Feb. 27, 2004]
[edit reason] No urls, thanks. See TOS [webmasterworld.com] [/edit]

[yves1]

Well, Google owns "blogger". If you look at the robots.txt file of a "blogger" blog at blogspots, you get:

User-agent: msnbot
Disallow: /

Reload and you get:

User-agent: msnbot
Disallow: /
User-agent: googlebot
Disallow: /

Amazing...

[3rdWaveEd]

yves1, that's a remarkable finding. Can you edit the robots.txt file for the blog to return it to a friendlier state?

[valeyard]

Ouch! Well spotted, yves1.

This is a very, very stupid thing for Google to do. How will Microsoft respond when setting the defaults for their products that produce websites? I think I can guess...

Back to the original topic of the thread, I don't see blogs per se penalised at the moment. As a "hobby" I run a Blogger blog concerning a high profile UK person (it's most definitely not a "fan" site!). It's still on the first page of google.com when searching for the person's name.

Any drop in ranking for blogs might be a result of the fact that many of them cover such diverse topics. If the new algo is giving higher priority to semantic analysis and site theming then the traditional "Dear Diary" blog is likely to fall out of favour.

[hutcheson]

We don't know why Google blocks msnbot: it might, for instance, have been egregiously impolite spidering.

[philor]

Certainly easier to guess why msnbot might be blocked (good or evil reason) than it is to guess why googlebot's banned on random requests. Blog*Spot's load-balanced over several servers, so chances are that's where the variation comes from, but banning your own crawler? Odd.

On topic: I took a break from my blog for several months, and I see now that the toolbar PR for the front page is still 7, and entries from before the break still report PR of 5 or 6, but all entries since I came back in January report PR0, despite still being in the top few results for any keywords in the entries. I don't have any explanation, but it's interesting.

[Gory]

Google move probably came as a response to abuse, now anchor text of posts to blogs does not count. I think Google had no choice but to act against that.

[bonnyman]

What do you mean by "Blog link anchor text"?

Thanks,

A.B.

[Elijah]

What do you mean by "Blog link anchor text"?

Anchor text is the text between an achor.
For example: <a href="http://www.webmasterworld.com">Webmaster World</a>
The anchor text in the above example would be "Webmaster World".
Blog link anchor text would be any anchor text from a blog.

[3rdWaveEd]

The previous comment - "now anchor text of posts to blogs does not count" - is why I initiated this thread, and I'm glad to see somebody else describe the phenomena - namely, Google isn't viewing Link Anchor Text in blogs the way it sees link anchor text in websites. Any thoughts?

[edited by: 3rdWaveEd at 6:39 pm (utc) on Feb. 28, 2004]

[philor]

My casual experiment does make it look that way. There's a phrase that Semantic Web people use to explain why keyword searching isn't enough (roughly, "how many blue widgets in Texas?"), and that phrase made it into a Washington Post article. So, I just linked to a page that provided the answer, even though it lacks the keywords, with the phrase as anchor text. Within a day or so, the page I linked to was the number one result on Yahoo!, but my post was the number one result on Google.

G's unwillingness to be Googlebombed may actually be contributing to the impression people have that the SERPs are getting flooded with blogs: they want our links, but they don't trust us enough to provide them directly, so they make people pass through our posts to get to the link target.