Answering Alister Cameron
Today Alister Cameron was the guest blogger on Problogger. He dug into Google's patent for Blogsearch which is borderline Big Brother. At the end, he posed questions for readers which I will attempt to answer here.
1. Does it make sense to have Blogsearch separate from the main Google search engine? That's a tough question to answer. On the one hand, a niche search engine for blogs is highly useful. Where I get concerned is how Google handles blogs in its "regular" engine.
2. As Google Blogsearch gains in popularity, will new (or adjusted) SEO strategies emerge along with it? In Alister's post, he talks about how tagging, inclusion in Blogrolls, and even links in emails and IM are factors in Blogsearch. So I think the strategy should be a fusion of SEO/SMO.
3. How many people actually use Google Blogsearch (http://blogsearch.google.com)? I tried to find this information out by plugging it into Compete. It defaulted to Google.com. So then I plugged in the url for the Blogger based Blogsearch (search.blogger.com), but there wasn't enough data from Compete's users to offer traffic estimations.
4. Do you use it? I do use it! I have a personal movie-related blog and I use Blogsearch to get links for roundups. I've also found my posts listed in the first page of results for Blogsearch but nowhere to be found in Google. My blog is new, so it might still be stuck in the sandbox. Could it be that there's no sandbox for Blogsearch?
5. How do you find Google Blogsearch compares with Technorati? I've found far better results on Blogsearch. Having said that, Technorati is probably searched more, so it might make more sense to optimize for that.
Speaking of which:
seo, 
smo, 
social media optimization, 
blogsearch
1. Does it make sense to have Blogsearch separate from the main Google search engine? That's a tough question to answer. On the one hand, a niche search engine for blogs is highly useful. Where I get concerned is how Google handles blogs in its "regular" engine.
2. As Google Blogsearch gains in popularity, will new (or adjusted) SEO strategies emerge along with it? In Alister's post, he talks about how tagging, inclusion in Blogrolls, and even links in emails and IM are factors in Blogsearch. So I think the strategy should be a fusion of SEO/SMO.
3. How many people actually use Google Blogsearch (http://blogsearch.google.com)? I tried to find this information out by plugging it into Compete. It defaulted to Google.com. So then I plugged in the url for the Blogger based Blogsearch (search.blogger.com), but there wasn't enough data from Compete's users to offer traffic estimations.
4. Do you use it? I do use it! I have a personal movie-related blog and I use Blogsearch to get links for roundups. I've also found my posts listed in the first page of results for Blogsearch but nowhere to be found in Google. My blog is new, so it might still be stuck in the sandbox. Could it be that there's no sandbox for Blogsearch?
5. How do you find Google Blogsearch compares with Technorati? I've found far better results on Blogsearch. Having said that, Technorati is probably searched more, so it might make more sense to optimize for that.
Speaking of which:
seo, smo, social media optimization, blogsearchLabels: alister cameron, blogger, blogging, Blogsearch, google, patent, problogger, SEO, smo, technorati
