Net Q & A

Question of the Month: August 2003

Why Do Search Engines Like Blogs?

Lawsuits involving medical apparatus named "Ancure Guidant stent devices" can be very lucrative, so much so that at least 10 law firms have paid the search engine Google to have their law firms show up as "Sponsored Links," or advertisements, when that phrase is entered. However, when you run that search at Google, the top ranked non-paid position is the Wisconsin Personal Injury Lawyers Blog. Skeptical? It's easy to try that search yourself. (Results may differ, as search engines are constantly tweaking their ranking formulas and new site are entering the databases). What makes it even more interesting is that the author of the Wisconsin Personal Injury Lawyers Blog appears to have put very little time and money into it. (He hasn't even paid the $10 or so to get rid of the banner ad at the top of the page).

OK, so why  do blogs have such high visibility in search engines? I explained some of the reasons in my article Web Logs for Lawyers: Lessons From Ernie The Attorney.

A blog called A Whole Lotta Nothing suggested some other reasons:

"Let's look at what types of things a search engine like Google likes to see:

In the web's history, few sites did all the above well, so using these properties as criteria in locating good sites could be reliable. I think it's a total accident that blogs do all of the above well, especially those with nice Movable Type setups that create meaningful page titles and filenames, and those designed with CSS and using well-structured content. I don't think people set out to do each thing specifically to gain in Google rankings, but the cumulative effect of all the above is pushing blogs high into searches for almost anything."

Jerry Lawson