One aspect of the regular search algorithm that seems of increasing importance to blog search is authority; page rank, or what ever you want to call it. Simply, ensuring that blog search fosters the inherent premise of a blog by promoting real bloggers.
I LOVE blog search. I can’t stress enough how much I prefer it over regular search for finding great authors and opinion pieces about news, work, tips, and resources – through blogs. I’d rather link from SEO’Brien to other bloggers, endorsing and supporting those passionate about sharing their experience and wisdom, while trying to earn a living online.
Enter blog spam. Or perhaps it should be called Black Hat Blogging? As traditional media companies and spammers have caught on to how blogs effectively optimize content for search engines, automatically ping crawlers, and prominently index in both blog and traditional search results, everyone is turning to the platform as a means of attracting attention. Publications traditionally considered news channels now flood blog search results with editorial and commentary alike; sure, often written by bloggers or transparent reporters (by which I mean that they are clear about the fact that it is a paid reporter blogging… not that reporters are trans… nevermind) but they have one quality that distinguishes them from bloggers – they are all run by media companies with a bottom line more influenced by the dollar than the passion of its author.
I want experience driven, not reporting or opinion based, content from my blogs.
Worse? The pure spam
With exponentially increasing regularity that reminds me of the time I drank too much Metamucil, blog search is littered with sites put up only to automatically populate with others’ content, promotional articles that link only to one service or business, or the brief “click here to read more” snippets that link to ebook publishers, seminar hawkers, or just amazon.com’s affiliate program.
Is it too much to ask to make blog search bring me results from genuine bloggers? I’m not asking that you figure out how to prevent promotional blogs and articles; heck, we’re all in it for that reason, just do me the small favor of refining blog search so that I can find my friends, my peers, the professionals who work and sweat for their living and want to offer a few insights and pearls of wisdom from a blog.
Even before the indexing problem is solved, it seems like it couldn’t be that hard to eliminate results where:
– Blog has fewer than 5 posts
– Ratio of linked words to non-linked words is no greater than 1:5 (or whatever value makes sense).
Those two things would eliminate a big slice of spam blogs and promotion-only blogs.
Yes! Cindy! is that so much to ask?! Heck, give us an option to restrict the results as such if they fear slicing the index themselves.
If we consider, and agree, that Twitter is the (or AN) ideal future of search; at least show us that blog search (which I’d consider a step between traditional and real-time search engines) can work.
I feel your pain. The trade show blog which I write for gets comments all the time from legit websites that sell trade show giveaways. The comments are not technically spam, but they are always one or two-liners that start out with “great point” or “nice article!” Then, of course, they have a link back to their website. I think I may put a note on the homepage of my blog about posting only genuine comments.
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