Is Google Blogsearch dumping blogs from its index?

I noticed something curious this week which I suspect may afflict many low-frequency bloggers, especially people in the science fiction and fantasy community. Google Blogsearch seems to favor only frequently updated blogs.

At work I used to write 5 days a week for a blog called SEO Theory. I had to suspend daily updates to the blog several months ago because my work schedule was overwhelmed. I have occasionally posted new articles on SEO Theory but not with any consistency.

Time was, if you wrote a blog post -- especially on Blogger -- you could expect to see it show up in Google Blogsearch almost immediately and eventually it looked like it would move over to the Main Web Index in a matter of days (for popular blogs, at least).

In October 2008 Google redesigned its Blogsearch service and at the time they hailed it as a step forward. Unfortunately, from that time forward many blogs I had followed through Blogsearch (without bookmarking them because Blogsearch was so convenient in indexing their latest content) simply vanished from the search results.

Having discussed the changes in Blogsearch results online with a couple of Googlers (who asked for specific examples I was not able to provide because I had until then not needed to bookmark good blogs), I found little hope in seeing Google restore its once superior blog indexing service.

Still, I was working on some popular blogs that were being indexed quickly so there remained some value in Blogsearch for me. Until this week, when I noticed that a blog post on SEO Theory titled Brent Payne's PageRank Sculpting Report is Bogus had not appeared in the Blogsearch results.

You can find the article just fine in Main Web Search -- which is what most people use -- but the article simply doesn't appear in Google Blogsearch. Anything duplicating its content or linking to it shows up just fine, apparently.

So I checked another blog I had created for work which had received much less attention than SEO Theory. That blog had vanished completely from Google's Web indexes -- it's not even appearing the Main Web Search for its own name.

The only common factor between the two blogs (SEO Theory has far more links than the other one) is that the posting rates died down to almost nothing or nothing. So it seems like, in order to be included in Google Blogsearch your blog has to be updated with new content on a regular basis, probably once or twice a week.

Another blog I write for (yes, I keep up with a fair number of them), Best SEO Blog, appears in the Google Blogsearch index just fine, usually within seconds or minutes of publishing a post.

So if you're wondering why your science fiction blog is not receiving any traffic, it may be because you don't post much to it any more. I cannot guarantee that, but if you have stopped posting new articles, maybe you should try writing something twice a week for a month or two and see what happens.

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Borders launches science fiction blog

To help build its competitive position on the Internet, Borders has launched its own blog called Babel Clash (is the name inspired by Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy).

Booksellers are feeling the pinch of the recession, too. I know there are a few books I have put off purchasing even though I'm still employed. My secondary income has fallen off a bit in some areas.

Blogs are the new marketing tool de jeur -- meaning that any retailers who start up blogs in 2009 have been missing the boat for the past several years. Playing catchup at this late stage in the game is not easy.

Unfortunately, the early blog posts don't really impress me. They lack substance. It looks like Borders is trying to cash in on the Twitter phenomenon, but now that they have a real blog they should use it for real blogging. Leave the Tweeting to the Twits on Twitter who have nothing more to say about life in general than "Going to the supermarket for mushrooms".

You'll know that Kim Harrison (Borders' blogger) is doing it right when s/he puts at least five paragraphs into a blog post each day.

SF-Fandom is a moderated, fan-run community devoted to science fiction, fantasy, history, and mythology. SF-Fandom was founded in 2001 and is part of the Xenite.Org network. Free registration is required to post. Please be sure you read our Posting Guidelines.