Google Loves a Tasty BlogRoll

Judging by a patent application filed by Google for ranking blog search, one of the three things a blog should have is a blogroll, and being included in some high-quality ones will help too

Google considers blogs to contain three content types:

• The content of recent posts,
• A blogroll, and;
• Blog metadata (author profile information and/or other information about the blog or its
author).

While it's likely Google is going to look at other factors in ranking blogs, the positives and negatives observed by experts show how the process resembles the fabled PageRank Google has used as part of its website rankings.

Positive factors for a blog include its popularity, inclusion in blogrolls (especially high-quality ones), and tagging of the blog. News aggregator subscriptions could imply high popularity. Google said that it could validate those against "subscriptions spam" by checking for unique subscriber IP addresses.

Some negative factors could impact a blog. New posting frequency, especially at set intervals, could be a tipoff of a low quality, i.e. spam, blog. Post content and size might raise alarms in Google's algorithm, and push the blog to a lower ranking.