Judging by a patent application filed by Google for ranking blog search, one of the three things a blog should have is a blogroll, and being included in some high-quality ones will help too.
Google Loves A Tasty Blogroll
SEO by the Sea blogger Bill Slawski has made a practice of diving into the rough waters of patent language, and emerging with pearls of detailed, readable wisdom.
His recent
On the positive side of the calculation, Slawski suggested how Google might calculate another factor mentioned in the filing:
Implied popularity
Instead of explicit subscriptions, an “implied popularity” could be calculated from data collected from people searching on Blog Search, and examining the click stream of search results: For example, if a certain blog document is clicked more than other blog documents when the blog document appears in result sets, this may be an indication that the blog document is popular and, thus, a positive indicator of the quality of the blog document.
Some negative factors could impact a blog. New posting frequency, especially at set intervals, could be a tipoff of a low quality, i.e. spam, blog. Post content and size might raise alarms in Google's algorithm, and push the blog to a lower ranking.
Slawski offered a couple of points where such negative ranking could affect a blog that actually contains valid content. A blog about Nigerian spam emails, he noted, may not rank well by Google's criteria.
Google could also divine some unsavory intent by the way links get sprinkled throughout a blog, by Slawski's reckoning:
Link distribution of the blog document
It appears that under this quality scoring system, whom you are linking to is considered, too:
As disclosed above, some posts are created to increase the pagerank of a particular blog document. In some cases, a high percentage of all links from the posts or from the blog document all point to ether a single web page, or to a single external site. If the number of links to any single external site exceeds a threshold, this can be a negative indication of quality of the blog document.
At the end of January, Robert Scoble
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