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.

L K Advani and Chris Brogan mentions

L K Advani, Chris Brogan Sentiment Analysis

News Mentions for L K Advani and Chris Brogan

Blog mentions l K Advani and Chris Brogan

Twitter mentions L K Advani and Chris Brogan

Chris had a very interesting post on how does the web define authority.

In that he questions “It would be easy to bog ourselves down in definitions of the word “authority” itself. In this case, let’s agree that the working definition as it pertains to this topic is: a blog or website or even an individual person and their credibility, knowledge, and reputation on the Web. Is this close enough? How would you change this?”

How do we define authority though? BuzzGain does it with 21 metrics.

1. Blog content and tags for a vertical – in this case social media. Its an exhaustive list of about 25 to tags ranging from facebook to personal branding and from social news to blogging & blogs. The more you write about these topics the more likely you are an authority on some or all of them. You are more likely passionate about them, which is a start for being an authority.

2. Location of posts on SERP (Search engine results page) related to tags on Google Search. The higher you appear, (i.e. if you come on the first page of the SERP, you are higher than on the second page and so on) the more authority you have.

3. Frequency of posting. More frequent the better obviously.

4. Traffic & Visitors: Both website visitors and # of RSS subscribers define traffic for a blog. We track them both to assign a metric number between 1 and 5. More traffic = higher the authority.

5. Engagement of readers: How many comments do you have per article. How many overall? What is the time to comment – i.e. How quickly does someone comment as soon as you post an article? More engaging readers define a more social experience and a higher authority.

7. Quality of posts: Thanks to our partnership with AideRSS, we can tell which posts of yours are of high quality. This usually means which ones got “Dugg” or “Bookmarked” and how many comments exist on that post. Posts that have the highest quality are the ones we consider towards your authority.

7. Twitter: Of the 126 “socially aware” applications, this is the King Kong of social connections. We track # of followers, your “tweet frequency”, and the # of @ replies to your tweets. The assigned number for your Twitter authority comes as a combination of these characteristics.

8. Social Bookmarking: Currently we support Stumbleupon and delicious although we have been looking at diigo, Magnolia and Furl. More bookmarks and more followers indicate a sense of higher authority.

9. Social News: How many followers you have on Digg and the velocity of your digg posts to their overall appearance on the top of the digg homepage.

10. Social Network presence: This is obvious but the more “in the field” links to other folks you have on LinkedIn and Facebook the higher you rank in our authority list. We are looking to support other social networks, but these are the primary ones in our belief.

There are 11 other metrics that define authority, which I will mention briefly since this post is very long already. They include presence in blog directories, blog search engines (IceRocket, for e.g.), # of your incoming links, Google Pagerank, presence on photo sites and other microblogs, frequency of sharing items on Google reader, whether you podcast and videocast, # of times you guest blog on other “authority blog” and frequency of your interviews on other relevant / related blogs in your field.

image credit: Allposters