Google Blog Search
Google Blog Search is a special Google service, which allows users to search specifically for weblogs.
Google has offered a search specifically for blogs Since 2005. Bloggers can have their website listed there to be found by other bloggers using search requests. This way, blogs with special interests and niches can be found. A blog can be easily registered with Google and identifies the blog for Google as such.
Features
If you are on the Google homepage and type a search query into the search field, you can then focus on blogs under the menu “More.” Google will then only display blogs that match this query and have already been indexed. The search options can then be further defined with a few clicks. The whole web can be browsed, or only websites from the United States or in English. In addition, you can search for current blogposts or whole blogs.
However, two functions are particularly interesting. The results of the blog search can be limited in time and sorted by relevance. For example, blog postings of the past 24 hours or especially relevant blog postings can be displayed. A blog post is considered relevant if it has been clicked and read in the Blogosphere (the community of bloggers) and possibly linked or commented. The latter point is important for targeted internet marketing. If certain blogs and blogposts are currently particularly popular, it is recommended to identify trend topics and make use of them.
Marketing professionals can use this information, which they can also subscribe to via Google Alerts, to create campaign content. This can also be of benefit with the issue management of a company.
Practical relevance
If your blog cannot be found in the blog search, there are several ways to fix this. With the site query function “site: www.your-url.com” in Google’s blog search, you can first check whether the blog has been indexed. If Google does not show any results, the blog is not in the index.
If the blog was indexed by Google, you should ensure that the feed was activated. Only when the feed is activated will it be displayed by popular readers and can be successfully subscribed to by interested prospects. Feeds should not be excluded from indexing in the Robots.txt file. Some content management systems have an option to exclude indexing via the backend feeds. It is recommended to check that the CMS settings are correct. Finally, the settings of the feed reader used can be checked. Sometimes there is a checkbox with the value 'noindex'. However, this depends on the respective reader.
Relevance to SEO
Google’s blog crawler collects various information from the blogosphere and sorts the blog search results correspondingly. Google Blog Search works differently to the Websites search engine. In a blog search, the whole page will not be crawled. Rather, all pages that publish a feed are indexed. Most feeds are in XML format and contain up-to-date information about the latest entries and the blog in general. If articles, videos, or audio files are posted on a page or blog, the feed collects these news in a compressed format and then passes it on to subscribers and search engines.
Although Google has deleted its own Google Reader from its portfolio as of July 1, 2013, many existing feedreaders can continue to read feeds. However, the current trend is in the direction of media. While a user’s numbers of feeds are declining, the number of recommendations is increasing in social channels. This means that many users are increasingly taking advantage of Facebook, Twitter and Google+ to get up-to-date and interesting information from the web.
It can be assumed that Google’s blog search is no longer only collecting feeds, but for Google other signals from the blogosphere are relevant in order to arrange the results of the blog search. As mentioned above, these signals include click rates, pageviews, links and blog comments.