Google Blog Search is Google’s vertical search engine which focuses exclusively on blog content. While overall usage is probably pretty low, results from Google blog search are starting to appear in Google’s web search as part of their “Universal Search”, more generally known as blended search. Blog content can appear in Google’s standard web search independently of its presence in Google Blog Search. Google’s Chris Pennock, an Engineer with Google’s New York office, discussed how Google Blog Search works at the SMX West search conference.
Moderator: Matt McGee, Assignment Editor, Search Engine Land
Speaker: Chris Pennock, Senior Software Engineer, Blog Search, Google Inc.
Who uses Google Blog Search?
Google Blog Search is used by someone looking for more opinionated or fresher information. Users come may come from Google.com or a blogger looking for information on their own blog. (Google Blog Search also powers some of the information in the WordPress dashboard – Sean).
Notify Google of a new post
How does a post get into blog search results? The act of publishing a new or updated post triggers a “ping” which tells Google to crawl or re-crawl the post. A post will be re-indexed only if there are changes. The entire process takes about 10 minutes on average.
Chris presents a slide which looks a the anatomy of a blog search result, noting in particular the back links for a post (ears prick up in the room – Sean).
How Google ranks blog posts
Blog post ranking is done by relevancy and recency. The ranking algorithm takes into account a blog’s reputation. Chris recommends that a blogger start with good quality content. The rest will follow (where have I heard this before? – Sean). Don’t just copy content from others; you need to provide original value.
The time to attract links is a ranking factor. Blog posts will show directly in Google.com if they rank well. Blogs can be given a boost if a query is hot, buzzing. The position of a blog result in a Google.com SERP, in the middle or at the bottom of page, depends on how certain Google is that the post is relevant.
Custom search feeds available
Google offers custom search feeds for a blog – you can subscribe to any search as a feed (This has lots of reputation monitoring possibilities! – Sean). Meme, for lack of a better word, tracking is a new feature. Something discussed prominently will display on the Google Blog Search home page. Meme tracking lifetime is about a day for now. Google Blog search is similar to Google news but there isn’t a bias against niche sites. The By topic option is a nice filter.
Entire post is indexed, not just feed
Initially Google Blog Search relied on the blog’s feed for indexing. Yet not all feeds contain the full post (and feeds may be different from the actual post, ed.). Google now indexes the full html post. One downside to this is that the blogroll is now showing up in the back link listing for a post. Google is responding to this problem and much has been cleared up. For more information and feedback, consult the public discussion forum in Google groups.
Spam free results, almost
It is unlikely that you will encounter spam for common queries. Spam may show up for niche queries. If you do find some, please email the blog search team. Be sure to mention blog search in form.
Matt starts the question and answer session. Eric Enge, President, Stone Temple is the Q&A Moderator behind the Oz curtain.
- Q: How does Google check for new blog content?
- The best way to ping Google. Major platforms should do this automatically.
- Q: About blog ranking…
- Google uses the signals you would expect, similar to google.com (Google Web Search – Sean)
- Q: Is feed readership a signal?
- We’re pretty data driven (Translated: YES, but I cannot tell you – Sean)
- Q: How much is it a challenge to distinguish between sites, blogs, forums?
- We’re pretty flexible. It is a challenge. We do ok but we could do better
- Q: What percentage of blogs are indexed?
- Almost all which ping. Others are challenging
- Q: How often should a blog be updated?
- Update frequency is not a dominating factor
Disclaimer: this post aims to capture the essence of this session. It is based on the live twitter blogging I did while at SMX West 2009. It is not a word-for-word transcription nor necessarily complete. Use accordingly 
. If you found this interesting, I strongly suggest you attend a future SMX conference in person for a full 3-D experience!
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Sean Carlos is a web marketing consultant & teacher, assisting companies with their Search (SEO + PPC = SEM), Social Media & Digital Media Measurement strategies. Sean first worked with text indexing in 1990 in a project for the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Since then he worked for Hewlett-Packard Consulting and later as IT Manager of a real estate website before founding Antezeta in 2006. Sean is an 
Okay so Google blogserach is looking for opinionated and fresher content? As long as it does not contain any adult content despite my submitting a blog with an opinion on the adult world .And yet Google will support an adwords campaign with adult content one day and pause it the next.So hypocritical ! No matter what you think of pornography its big business and as such people want to know why . They will never find out if Google have anything to do with it.
I do not forget to ping the blog once it has been published even some other pinglers that offer free pinging services. The next is to promote that post via bookmarking to some social media sites like facebook, twitter, delicious etc.