Are blogs SEO friendly by Nature?
Posted on September 11, 2008 by
Roy 
Blogging, SEO 
5 Comments
There is a common saying that search engines love blogs as they are always full of fresh content (updated frequently).
Undoubtedly this is a good point. Frequent updates also make search bots to revisit your blog frequently. But does it have any negative effect?
Yes there are some problems – the very nature of a blog makes it tough to optimize around specific keywords. Just think about the basic on-page optimization concept – keyword density. As your blog home page is updated regularly with new posts, it is tough to maintain keyword density.
And when you start publishing opinion posts, it is very tough to stick to a specific keyword group. More importantly, blog posts are fundamentally different from regular webpage content and people have different expectations from these two formats. And thus you cannot always be too accurate about keyword positioning or density.
Some people say that tags and categories make up for keyword density. But if you start publishing full posts in the home page, there are high chances that keywords in tags and categories will fall short to optimize the whole blog around specific keyword group (unless you are focusing on active link building).
If you say search engines love blogs because they are updated frequently, tell me one more thing – what does the word “update” mean?
If I am rewriting the content of a static webpage or making small changes now and then, doesn’t it mean that I am updating that page frequently? And at the same time, a static webpage gives me the opportunity to maintain healthy keyword density. Do not forget that in case of blogs, we are actually publishing different pages (posts) rather than updating a single page.
And why should I bother about the frequency of search engine crawling, if it does not help me to stay focused with specific keyword group.
What do you think?
Does regular update make it tough to optimize a blog around specific keyword group?
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I disagree. Google doesn’t like blogs at all. They consider it mostly useless information that is mostly not what people are searching for. They introduced nofollow tags specifically because of comment spam on blogs (rathar than try to find a better solution).
It’s so bad now that if you launch a new blog chances are it will take you longer than a non blog site to be included in google’s index (unless you have some really juicy content).
I agree about blogs being updated more frequently than other pages though. I think google shys away from forums as well nowadays.
I don’t know where you get that idea, Debt, but Google and Yahoo crawl my site every few hours. That can only mean the spiders like my blog.
To answer your question, Roy. Search engines like frequently updated blog because it is a sign that the owner is maintaining the blog and it is presumed to be up to date. That is certainly a factor, although they can’t be sure the content is up to date.
Regarding keyword density, it is now obsolete. Do your best to optimize the on-page factors. A keyword optimized title helps.
You also need to keep your site structure and linkage with proper linking. In SEO term, this is siloing.
Backlinks are another thing you should be focus on to give the spiders hints about the topic of your blog pages.
Hope that clears the issue a bit.
Hendry Lee,
Sorry, I exaggerated a bit. It’s not that they don’t like blogs, they just don’t like a few things that are common to blogs, like comment spam, duplicate content, or useless content.
Getting a blog to rank is hard because there are so many blogs out there so it’s now competitive.
It’s not so much that google doesn’t like blogs, as much as there are so many blogs that it’s tough to get attention (even tougher now that the established high PR blogs all use nofollow).
Unless I’m missing something, I don’t see the relationship between frequent updates and the inability to keep keyword focused.
If you have a personal site that covers everything from flowers through the politics, then the keyword theme for a site is going to be all over the place and the opposite is also true - if you’ve got a site only about marketing - then you’ll have a good chance of maintaining solid keyword focus.
How often you update a single page or add new pages to a site has little to do with keyword groups and everything to do with the content that the author chooses to put into each of those pages.