some pretty good testing, that it varies quite a bit between the different search engines. Yahoo seems to see only the first 210k of text on a page. Google sees approximately 520k, and MSN sees a whopping 1030k of text.

Admittedly that is a very large amount of text, probably more than most web sites would ever put on a single page. Let’s consider what the spider sees, when it looks at a blog like the one Butch Hamilton has created here. The titles for all of the blog archives are listed on the right. There are less than 100 posts now, but eventually, there could be thousands of posts and their corresponding titles listed as well.

I brief test of several popular blogs indicated that most had text from 10k to around 30k. This leaves plenty of room for additional links, and content before the spider limit would be reached.

Each post on a blog can be like an article, with it’s own title and content. This is the very epitome of what search engine spiders are looking for. On a typical blog you find organic links galore, fresh content updated on a continuous

Why is it that blogging is such an important SEO Strategy?

I have a theory that you may or may not agree with. I believe that blogs rule on the Search Engines due to one main reason, fresh content. There are endless debates among SEO professionals over whether quality content or back links are the most important to Google. These discussions miss the point if they are talking about quality content without taking into consideration content freshness.

Quality fresh content will win every time over and above any other consideration in Search Engine Optimization. The freshness of content is something that Google can judge quite easily whenever a web page is reindexed. It merely compares the current content with the index of the content from the last visit. I would submit, that the Google Spiders will require a much more sophisticated algorithm to judge quality content than freshness, and this is the main reason why freshness is all important.

After all, human editors frequently disagree concerning content quality. How could software robots be any different ? Any robust SEO Strategy should be based on not only quality content but fresh content as well. I believe that that fresh good quality content will win out over stale excellent quality content. It seems that the Google Spiders like fresh food even more than Subway Sandwiches does !

CNN is even ahead of Google News for a “news” search. Pretty amazing isn’t it, since Google News is indexing every one else’s news ? The New York Times is listed on page 4, and where is the Wall Street Journal? It is hard to find. I went to the first 10 pages of results and couldn’t find the Wall Street Journal anywhere. Here is a simple demonstration that will support my point about the value of freshness, Let’s do a little SEO Strategy research. Check the page rank of each of the following sites using the Google Toolbar.

CNN http://www.cnn.com Page Rank 9
The New York Times - www.nytimes.com/ Page Rank 8
The Wall Street Journal - Page Rank 8

Not to dish CNN at all, but if Google Page Rank were only concerned with content quality, don’t you think that the prestigious New York Times and Wall Street Journal should have at least as high a page rank as CNN ?

What about incoming links? Another SEO philosophy says that back links are the most important factor to achieve Page Rank and search engine position. Let’s look at incoming or back links using Google’s Advanced Search.

CNN – 205,000
The New York Times – 702,000
The Wall Street Journal – 66,000

If back links were the main criteria, then certainly The New York Times would be have the highest page rank, and not CNN. Note: one reason that that Google may be reporting such a small number of back links for the Wall Street Journal, is because much of the Wall Street Journal’s content is subscription-based, which requires a user name and password, that could stop the Google spiders.

The approximate size of each of the sites is reported by Google Advanced Search, as CNN – 1.3 million pages, The New York Times – 930,000 pages, and The Wall Street Journal – 859,000 pages. Sites of this magnitude will most likely garner a high page rank on Google, due not only to content, but shear size.

If you do a Google search for news, and variations such as financial news, business news, current news, CNN comes up number one every time. Why does this happen? It is safe to say that it is due to fresh content.

CNN’s site is updated on a minute by minute basis with content, unlike either the New York Times site or the Wall Street Journal’s site which are probably updated on an hourly or even a daily basis. Google simply loves fresh content, and search results would seem to contend that CNN is one of the absolute masters of fresh content on the Internet.

From this simple comparison, we can see how dramatically fresh content affects page rank and search engine position.

I ran across a rather fascinating SEO strategy article recently, called "Where the bots stop". This article focuses on the question of how deep spiders dig when they index a web page.

It was found through what looks like some pretty good testing, that it varies quite a bit between the different search engines. Yahoo seems to see only the first 210k of text on a page. Google sees approximately 520k, and MSN sees a whopping 1030k of text.

Admittedly that is a very large amount of text, probably more than most web sites would ever put on a single page. Let’s consider what the spider sees, when it looks at a blog like the one Butch Hamilton has created here. The titles for all of the blog archives are listed on the right. There are less than 100 posts now, but eventually, there could be thousands of posts and their corresponding titles listed as well.

I brief test of several popular blogs indicated that most had text from 10k to around 30k. This leaves plenty of room for additional links, and content before the spider limit would be reached.

Each post on a blog can be like an article, with it’s own title and content. This is the very epitome of what search engine spiders are looking for. On a typical blog you find organic links galore, fresh content updated on a continuous b

rent ? Any robust SEO Strategy should be based on not only quality content but fresh content as well. I believe that that fresh good quality content will win out over stale excellent quality content. It seems that the Google Spiders like fresh food even more than Subway Sandwiches does !

CNN is even ahead of Google News for a “news” search. Pretty amazing isn’t it, since Google News is indexing every one else’s news ? The New York Times is listed on page 4, and where is the Wall Street Journal? It is hard to find. I went to the first 10 pages of results and couldn’t find the Wall Street Journal anywhere. Here is a simple demonstration that will support my point about the value of freshness, Let’s do a little SEO Strategy research. Check the page rank of each of the following sites using the Google Toolbar.

CNN http://www.cnn.com Page Rank 9
The New York Times - www.nytimes.com/ Page Rank 8
The Wall Street Journal - Page Rank 8

Not to dish CNN at all, but if Google Page Rank were only concerned with content quality, don’t you think that the prestigious New York Times and Wall Street Journal should have at least as high a page rank as CNN ?

What about incoming links? Another SEO philosophy says that back links are the most important factor to achieve Page Rank and search engine position. Let’s look at incoming or back links using Google’s Advanced Search.

CNN – 205,000
The New York Times – 702,000
The Wall Street Journal – 66,000

If back links were the main criteria, then certainly The New York Times would be have the highest page rank, and not CNN. Note: one reason that that Google may be reporting such a small number of back links for the Wall Street Journal, is because much of the Wall Street Journal’s content is subscription-based, which requires a user name and password, that could stop the Google spiders.

The approximate size of each of the sites is reported by Google Advanced Search, as CNN – 1.3 million pages, The New York Times – 930,000 pages, and The Wall Street Journal – 859,000 pages. Sites of this magnitude will most likely garner a high page rank on Google, due not only to content, but shear size.

If you do a Google search for news, and variations such as financial news, business news, current news, CNN comes up number one every time. Why does this happen? It is safe to say that it is due to fresh content.

CNN’s site is updated on a minute by minute basis with content, unlike either the New York Times site or the Wall Street Journal’s site which are probably updated on an hourly or even a daily basis. Google simply loves fresh content, and search results would seem to contend that CNN is one of the absolute masters of fresh content on the Internet.

From this simple comparison, we can see how dramatically fresh content affects page rank and search engine position.

I ran across a rather fascinating SEO strategy article recently, called "Where the bots stop". This article focuses on the question of how deep spiders dig when they index a web page.

It was found through what looks like some pretty good testing, that it varies quite a bit between the different search engines. Yahoo seems to see only the first 210k of text on a page. Google sees approximately 520k, and MSN sees a whopping 1030k of text.

Admittedly that is a very large amount of text, probably more than most web sites would ever put on a single page. Let’s consider what the spider sees, when it looks at a blog like the one Butch Hamilton has created here. The titles for all of the blog archives are listed on the right. There are less than 100 posts now, but eventually, there could be thousands of posts and their corresponding titles listed as well.

I brief test of several popular blogs indicated that most had text from 10k to around 30k. This leaves plenty of room for additional links, and content before the spider limit would be reached.

Each post on a blog can be like an article, with it’s own title and content. This is the very epitome of what search engine spiders are looking for. On a typical blog you find organic links galore, fresh content updated on a continuous

u think that the prestigious New York Times and Wall Street Journal should have at least as high a page rank as CNN ?

What about incoming links? Another SEO philosophy says that back links are the most important factor to achieve Page Rank and search engine position. Let’s look at incoming or back links using Google’s Advanced Search.

CNN – 205,000
The New York Times – 702,000
The Wall Street Journal – 66,000

If back links were the main criteria, then certainly The New York Times would be have the highest page rank, and not CNN. Note: one reason that that Google may be reporting such a small number of back links for the Wall Street Journal, is because much of the Wall Street Journal’s content is subscription-based, which requires a user name and password, that could stop the Google spiders.

The approximate size of each of the sites is reported by Google Advanced Search, as CNN – 1.3 million pages, The New York Times – 930,000 pages, and The Wall Street Journal – 859,000 pages. Sites of this magnitude will most likely garner a high page rank on Google, due not only to content, but shear size.

If you do a Google search for news, and variations such as financial news, business news, current news, CNN comes up number one every time. Why does this happen? It is safe to say that it is due to fresh content.

CNN’s site is updated on a minute by minute basis with content, unlike either the New York Times site or the Wall Street Journal’s site which are probably updated on an hourly or even a daily basis. Google simply loves fresh content, and search results would seem to contend that CNN is one of the absolute masters of fresh content on the Internet.

From this simple comparison, we can see how dramatically fresh content affects page rank and search engine position.

I ran across a rather fascinating SEO strategy article recently, called "Where the bots stop". This article focuses on the question of how deep spiders dig when they index a web page.

It was found through what looks like some pretty good testing, that it varies quite a bit between the different search engines. Yahoo seems to see only the first 210k of text on a page. Google sees approximately 520k, and MSN sees a whopping 1030k of text.

Admittedly that is a very large amount of text, probably more than most web sites would ever put on a single page. Let’s consider what the spider sees, when it looks at a blog like the one Butch Hamilton has created here. The titles for all of the blog archives are listed on the right. There are less than 100 posts now, but eventually, there could be thousands of posts and their corresponding titles listed as well.

I brief test of several popular blogs indicated that most had text from 10k to around 30k. This leaves plenty of room for additional links, and content before the spider limit would be reached.

Each post on a blog can be like an article, with it’s own title and content. This is the very epitome of what search engine spiders are looking for. On a typical blog you find organic links galore, fresh content updated on a continuous

ank on Google, due not only to content, but shear size.

If you do a Google search for news, and variations such as financial news, business news, current news, CNN comes up number one every time. Why does this happen? It is safe to say that it is due to fresh content.

CNN’s site is updated on a minute by minute basis with content, unlike either the New York Times site or the Wall Street Journal’s site which are probably updated on an hourly or even a daily basis. Google simply loves fresh content, and search results would seem to contend that CNN is one of the absolute masters of fresh content on the Internet.

From this simple comparison, we can see how dramatically fresh content affects page rank and search engine position.

I ran across a rather fascinating SEO strategy article recently, called "Where the bots stop". This article focuses on the question of how deep spiders dig when they index a web page.

It was found through what looks like some pretty good testing, that it varies quite a bit between the different search engines. Yahoo seems to see only the first 210k of text on a page. Google sees approximately 520k, and MSN sees a whopping 1030k of text.

Admittedly that is a very large amount of text, probably more than most web sites would ever put on a single page. Let’s consider what the spider sees, when it looks at a blog like the one Butch Hamilton has created here. The titles for all of the blog archives are listed on the right. There are less than 100 posts now, but eventually, there could be thousands of posts and their corresponding titles listed as well.

I brief test of several popular blogs indicated that most had text from 10k to around 30k. This leaves plenty of room for additional links, and content before the spider limit would be reached.

Each post on a blog can be like an article, with it’s own title and content. This is the very epitome of what search engine spiders are looking for. On a typical blog you find organic links galore, fresh content updated on a continuous

some pretty good testing, that it varies quite a bit between the different search engines. Yahoo seems to see only the first 210k of text on a page. Google sees approximately 520k, and MSN sees a whopping 1030k of text.

Admittedly that is a very large amount of text, probably more than most web sites would ever put on a single page. Let’s consider what the spider sees, when it looks at a blog like the one Butch Hamilton has created here. The titles for all of the blog archives are listed on the right. There are less than 100 posts now, but eventually, there could be thousands of posts and their corresponding titles listed as well.

I brief test of several popular blogs indicated that most had text from 10k to around 30k. This leaves plenty of room for additional links, and content before the spider limit would be reached.

Each post on a blog can be like an article, with it’s own title and content. This is the very epitome of what search engine spiders are looking for. On a typical blog you find organic links galore, fresh content updated on a continuous basis, and an easy to access format that search engines love. Fresh content is clearly the most significant factor in search engine positioning, and an essential element of any SEO Strategy. Happy Blogging!