I may have previously mentioned I run a little non-monetized blog and like everyone's my Google hits and SERPs fluctuate, to say the least. I have always tried to follow what I have read as Google best practices.
What I have never encountered, though, is specific advice on how to best present a blog to Google as opposed to, say, presenting an ecommerce site, and, complicating this, is that I have observed quite popular blogs plowing ahead as if Google's admonitions about thin or duplicate content simply didn't exist, for example, extremely high ranking blogs where posts may consist solely of outbound links with a few clever words attached, or equally high ranking sites with full (though acknowledged) reprints from other sites.
I don't know if anyone can really answer or even address this, but to the best of your knowledge how does Google really treat blogs compared with other sites like ecommerce sites? It goes without saying, of course, that, just as in praying to any other divinity we must submit "great content" with fervent sincerity.
In blogging as opposed to ecommerce, is Google in fact there performing as the tail rather than the dog, that is, the blog's word of mouth readership popularity is what then provokes Google to rank it rather than vice versa, even though it may otherwise casually break every rule of Google orthodoxy with impunity?
Anything else you can add to illuminate Google's treatments of these generally different types of sites would be appreciated.
