Buzzgain

Doing vanity searches is probably one of the things most bloggers do. There’s a reason for that – the top 3 drivers of traffic to any blog are organic search, links from other websites (and blogs) and direct URL (i.e. No referrer).

What’s different about search relevance in the blogosphere (and the comments-sphere)?

a) If there’s a blog that’s higher ranked than yours (by that I mean PageRank) and if you are mentioned in a post on that blog, it tends to appear higher in organic search results than your blog.

b) Recent (time sensitive) is more relevant in blog search. This is different than search results since the longer the page has been around, the more are the chances of getting more incoming links, which makes your blog post appear higher (though not always). Hence if you dont post frequently enough, your chances of appearing first on blog search engine results pages are minimal.

c) Comments: If you comment on a blog you input your blog URL and name details on that site. If that blog site is higher ranked for the search term then that blog appears higher than your own blog.

Lets do this by means of an example. I chose my friend Chris Brogan since I expected (thanks to his PageRank, posting frequency and # of people that link to him) his posts and blog to be up there in terms of organic results.

I took 5 blog search engines Ask, Technorati, Twingly, Google BlogSearch and IceRocket. I entered the term Chris Brogan. Click on the links to see the results.

Results:

1. Except Google Blogsearch the rest dont even show Chris’s website on the first page!

2. The other blog search engines show other bloggers who link to Chris’ content rank higher than Chris’s blog.

3. If you do a blog search by relevance on certain search engines do you even get to Chris Brogan’s blog.

The bottom line and some interesting questions:

1. If you are searching for blogs (by name of individual) then Google Blogsearch (about 50% of the time) will get your the best result. Are the rest of the blog search engines are a waste of time?

2. To make the list of related blogs (see it above the fold) on Google BlogSearch you need to have a PageRank of X. Where we are not sure what X is yet, but we’ll find out.

3. Is searching blogs different than websites at all? After all most blogs now have a sitemap similar to most large websites.