Google Watch - Google Products - How Google Ranks Blog Search Results

How Google Ranks Blog Search Results

Written By
Steve Bryant
Steve Bryant
Mar 20, 2007
1 minute read
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A recently published patent reveals the basic rules governing results in Google Blog Search, said the Google Operating System blog.

The patent, filed in September 2005 and published last week, reveals that Google uses — or at least planned to use — the following indicators to rank blog search results:

Positive signalsNegative signals (spam signals)
  • 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
  • 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”)

Bill Slawksi at SEO by the Sea published a bit about the same patent earlier last weekend.

One of the patent authors, Jason Goldman, was the former product manager for Blogger, but left Google in mid-2006. He recently began work as director of product strategy for Obvious, the makers ofthe most obnoxious app in the worldTwitter.

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