Some of you might be wondering why it is that blogs always seem to do better than e-commerce sites. The reason is quite simple.
SEO is all about links. Even the most well optimised sites need lots of links to get good rankings. Blogs differ from commercial sites in one major way and that is the fact they have links to and from their competitors.
Have you ever seen an e-commerce site with a list of links in the sidebar pointing at their competitors? Blogs link to other blogs all the time and, in return, usually get a load of links as a result.
Commercial sites are usually too short sighted to give out links – they want to get lots of links without doing anything in return. People who say that blogs rank because they are content rich are partially right but sites like Amazon seem to do OK based on lots of links and a few product reviews.
If you are starting a commercial site why not break the trend and start blogging and linking to your competitors. By working together you can get much higher rankings than by staying on your own.
Patrick Altoft is Director of Search at Leeds based digital & SEO agency Branded3. Patrick also runs Blogstorm.You can get our blog posts delivered for free by email every day - simply add your email address to the box below or alternatively grab the RSS feed.
{ 13 comments… read them below or add one }
I think that is actually a large part of the reason that many major companies have picked up and started blogging relatively seriously. It builds links which promotes their site, and in turn generates revenue – they have noticed this is harder to do without frequent updates and links inbound and out.
Blogs not only link out with their blog roll, it is difficult to blog regularly without linking out within the context of each post.
This phenomenon is one of the reasons that not-for-profits and edu sites rank so well (most EDU sites also benefit from being old, crusty and stable domains with lots of authority links!).
Google is in the business of understanding link relationships, not just back links. It is very easy to see that blogs, universities and not-for-profits tend towards creating a balanced, symmetric link profile that contains outbound links to authority sites from many, many pages within their site. Contrast this with a typical corporate site and the difference is obvious.
The moral of the story is that giving links is just as rewarding as getting them!
Blogs not only have lots of links, like you say, but they also frequently have fresh content. This makes them more Google-Approved as well.
Communities do very well too.
Will a blog hosted with Blogger have the same amount of traffic if it’s hosted on another hosting company? I noticed a blog I created on Blooger got picked up withing 1 day.
Blogs are king.
Google loves blogs, spiders my blog frequently. Guessing it’s because of all the changes, and nice people commenting
The links help, and I definitely agree with angela, the fresh content helps too.
Google likes this.
Another HUGE difference is the internal linking. Look at wikipedia, they link to their own pages on hundreds of their other pages… this helps a lot with SEO also. This article can help when setting up a blog, or any site for that matter.
http://www.webmasterworld.com/google_adsense/3846633.htm
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I run a small online business. Time is a major factor and i often work 7 days a week with 12-16 hour days.
Adding products, dealing with customers, sending out packages takes a long time and adding links for higher rankings can be difficult to fit in.
I think people feel more freedom and less rigidity with their blogs. I’d be happy to let you post on mine.
I wonder if this blog trend will fade over time ranking high in the search engines. Great insight to why they rank high though.
Great explanation on reasons for great PR blog ranking versus e-commerce sites. Most certainly the up to date content helps blogs too. Thanks for the great dialogue.
Links are important….. content is important….. page load speed is important. Simply put…. just build a good site and you'll do great.
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