Everything Search Needs to Know About Blogs—For Now

Posted on by Chief Marketer Staff

If blogging had gone to high school, it would now be looking forward eagerly to the next reunion. It’s been quite a year for the blogosphere.

In the last twelve months, blogs have shown that they have the power both to spread news (the Howard Dean howl) and to question it (the apparently bogus “60 Minutes” memos concerning President Bush’s career in the Air Force Reserve). They can also squash corporate reputations faster than a ballpoint pen can open a Kryptonite bike lock—complete with links to helpful Web demos. And they wound up the year with a number one ranking in a Fortune cover story on “Ten Tech Trends to Watch in 2005.”

Obviously blogs have an impact on the folks who create them—about 8 million people in the U.S., according to the Pew Internet & American Life Project—and those who read them (32 million, per the same study.) But the Pew research also found that 62% of American Internet users still don’t know what a “blog” is. What difference can this blogging trend make in their lives?

If they search the Web, it does. Search engines like Google and Yahoo spider blogs extensively because they have two attributes the engines value: a continuous stream of fresh content and lots of links, both inbound and outbound, suggesting popularity. If you’ve got a blog, you won’t have to wait long to get indexed by the major engines. And the more popular your blog becomes, as indicated not just by traffic but by links to it, the more they’ll crawl you. The blogging influence on search, and thus on SEM, is real.

Unfortunately, some of that influence has been less than benign. Recognizing that the engines rely heavily on blogs, some Web site owners have manipulated that system by posting links to their URLs in the public comment boxes provided at the end of many blog stories. This can increase their Web traffic, but more important, it can produce higher organic rankings for their sites on the search engines, since search crawlers find those links and assume they’re from legitimate posters. The insertions can be done automatically by bot software, so abusers don’t even need to invest sweat equity in inflating their page ranks.

Such cases are “comment spam” to the blog community. But to the search engines, they’re more than an irritant: They’re an erosion of the relevancy of the search results served up to users, and possibly even a threat to their business model.

To close this loophole, Google, Yahoo and MSN announced on Jan. 18 that they will team up with major blogging software providers to hang a special “nofollow” tag on all links posted in public areas of blog sites. In effect, those tags will tell the search engine crawlers to disregard the link for page ranking purposes. Blog readers will still be able to use the link if they wish. But by removing the primary reason to create comment spam, the search industry hopes to kill spammers’ motivation to practice it.

Gene McKenna, chief technology officer for online marketing firm Digital Impact, thinks that this type of gaming by link abusers is just a minor bump in the road, and that blogs and search engine marketing have many fruitful areas of common interest to be explored. “Things like [comment spam] are just passing fads,” he said in an interview just before the Google-Yahoo “no-follow” announcement. “They may not disappear, but the search engine world will find an appropriate way to weigh for them.”

In the long term, McKenna says, there are numerous synergies among blogs, search and the Web that will permit coordinated cross-channel marketing. Of course, the most basic of these is to create your own blog, but that’s tricky. Blogs need care and feeding. Their high refresh rates are part of their attraction for search engines, so a blog that lies fallow won’t help a company’s Web ranking.

Blog readers also tend to value forthright talk in a highly personal voice. That’s hard for most corporations to produce, and even harder for their general counsel to accept.

The independent nature and free speech of many bloggers may also put a natural cap on the use of blogs as vehicles for paid-placement advertising. Sometimes the blog turns out to be too strong for the advertiser; other times, the blogger may object to a specific advertiser placed on his site. In one recent case, a politically conservative blogger who signed up to accept ads through Google’s AdSense program signed out again after finding an ad on his site for a British magazine that featured a large photo of President Bush and the cover line, “How Can 59,054,087 People Be So Dumb?”

But a company can still attract crawler attention by posting links on its site to relevant blogs created by outsiders. After all, outbound links count too in figuring page rankings, and even more when they lead to sites with lots of new content. Adding such links constitutes a kind of search engine optimization and may be enough to move a Web site up higher in the search rankings. When that happens, McKenna says, the company has opportunities to get viewers to sign up for e-mail alerts, or a newsletter—anything to graduate from the one-to-all model of Web search to more focused one-to-many or one-to-one communication.

One of the most intriguing implications of the rise of blogs may lie not in the content but in its transport vehicle, namely, RSS feeds. Many readers use RSS to keep track of their favorite blogs, usually through news aggregators that crawl Web sites every so often to check for new content. The Pew research study found that about 5% of U.S. Internet users now employ RSS aggregators. That’s only about 6 million people now, but their numbers are bound to grow with the blog phenomenon.

RSS enjoys some advantages that may make it superior to e-mail, most notably its opt-in nature. Simply by signing up, consumers are agreeing to take communications from a merchant or content provider. Since everyone on the channel chose to be there, ISPs don’t filter for spam, producing 100% message deliverability. (Whether those messages get opened is a question that can’t as yet be measured.)

And merchants could personalize that content: for instance by setting up a unique URL and automating a blog that would show a computer buyer all the software upgrades and patches for his new equipment as they become available. Like blogs, RSS communications are automatically archived, so the medium would be particularly useful to marketers of products and services customers would use for a long time: car dealers, financial institutions, even law firms.

Seen in that light, blogs’ popularity today may produce a new mode of customer contact in the future. McKenna says Digital Impact has already fielded requests for proposals on using RSS for personalized marketing communication and will probably test a program in the next six months.

This shift from broadcast to narrowcast doesn’t surprise McKenna. “In the early days of e-mail, everyone signed up for listservs and got the exact same posts, whether they were meant for you or not,” he points out. “RSS is going to follow that same evolution.”

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