Blogs and Google: Proof positive(?) that Blogs are preferred over traditional pages

One of the (many) reasons we started hosting the Blog Business Summit was that we could see that the architecture provided significant search engine visibility advantages without all that SEO busywork. We knew business people would eventually catch on and stop fiddling with those silly metatags and “linking strategies” and decide to get into blogging instead. In fact, when businesspeople (mostly PR professionals these days) ask me “what’s the big deal about blogs?” my elevator pitch is that blogs (if done right) “are a great way to get search engines to love you”.

In a previous post, I took John Dvorak to task for dismissing some of the most well known bloggers as “people whom you’ve never heard of”.

The page he originally made that assertion from does have a link that broadcasts syndicated new product reviews, but I don’t see that this specific article (based on a technorati search) was ever distributed out in a feed.

I decided to see how Google would compare Dvorak’s article to my reference to it by searching for keywords that are on both pages. My request was specifically:

dvorak “utopianist bloggers”

I was very surprised to see that not only did my post rank higher (top spot!) but that Dvorak’s original article came in a lowly 7th place behind 3 other bloggers. Now, I’m not complaining, but it seems to me that the original article that people are commenting on should rank higher than the commenters posts. I would also expect two longtime powerhouses of relevant content (Dvorak and PC Magazine) would kick butt over 4 different guys that are likely sitting in their kitchens wearing pajamas.

In my mind, this can only be explained by the fact that items posted using a Google-respected blogging engine are much preferred (inordinately so?) over alternative architectures.

Here is a screen grab of the specific search results:

My post is in red, three other bloggers in green, and finally, Dvorak’s commentary in yellow.

Want to learn how we trumped PC Magazine in this search engine experiment? Come to the next Blog Business Summit (currently targeted for August 2005). Please take our brief survey, and we’ll email you very soon when we announce the next conference.