How to Write a Good Blog Post or
How Would You Rank a Blog Post?
Overview
A lot of ink has been spilled, or rather electrons spun, on how to optimize a blog for search engines. This post will tell you what you already know, and perhaps make it a little more clear. This is not another post to tell you how to maximize your SEO. Or is it?
While Who’s A Good Blog uses a crawler/search engine and reader/blogger suggestions to find and index blogs, it is the only blog discovery platform that also provides social feedback on a blog, including likes, views and subscriptions. The presentation order to readers depends on not only their search keywords or browse category, but also on the social metrics of the relevant blogs as well as our “ranking” of the post. This post is about how we, or any blog reader, would rank a post.
The classic advice to bloggers is (forget SEO) “Write for the reader”. Or as we say “Writing for the readers is the best SEO”. That is even more true on WhosaGoodBlog.com where readers see other readers feedback.
About Crawlers, Search Engines and SEO
Crawlers/search engines are trying their best to serve the reader looking for information. Any policy they implement is to try and get better results for the person searching for the information. The way to stay ahead of changes in their search/ranking algorithm is to, as you know, write for the reader.
All Things Being Equal (ATBE)
We are going to look at a number of factors that go into ranking a blog post. Any specific discussion assumes “All Things Being Equal”, in other words the two blogs being identical, except for the feature under discussion.
Days Since Post
What would you rank higher a blog post about a traveling in Paris in the past year or a post from 10 years ago? We agree. Places change, the people change, the politics change and certainly the prices change. The experience changes and the experience is a big part of what bloggers bring to the table. In ranking the blogs (ATBE), the newer blog would score higher.
Content Quantity
What would you rank higher, a blog post on your favorite topic, 100 words long or 1,000 words long? OK, we threw the match between 100 and 1,000 words with the word “favorite”. If it a simple fact the user is looking for 100 words could easily be better. But our readers are not here for simple facts (they can google those) they are here for opinions, insight and entertainment in addition to the facts. We consider more good content to be better (ATBE), up to a point.
Content Quality
No question here. Flat out quality is better. Spellink and gramars matter – to illustrate the point. (Ouch that hurts, like nails on a chalk board.)
Advertising
Which would you enjoy more? A blog with no ads or a blog with 100 ads, including pop-ups?
We get it, we all have to earn a living and the way bloggers (and ourselves) hope to earn a living is through advertising. We think that most readers are OK, with some advertising. We also think there is a point at which it becomes obnoxious. So yes, blogs with more ads will rank lower.
Affiliate Links
The rhetorical question here: Who’s opinion would you trust more? Someone getting paid to represent a product or someone not being paid or associated with the product. Blogs with more affiliates will rank lower. Blogs with undeclared affiliate links will rank even lower.
Plagiarism
Not cool. Go straight to jail. Do not pass go.
Self-plagiarism or re-using your own content on multiple pages is bad practice, depending on how much and how you re-use the content. WhosaGoodBlog tries not to index “Table of Contents” or index pages. (We follow them to find your postings, but try not to index them.) However if you put multiple posts on an index page, with more than the first paragraph of content we view that as spam and may not index any of the pages.
If you have multiple pages with essentially the same content, then it is the same deal. It's spam and may not be indexed.
Domain Integrity
Do I trust this site? This is one of the implicit questions readers ask themselves when they visit a site. While many search engines use domain authority (implied by backlinks), we use domain integrity (what you do).
Site integrity goes up with more articles on similar topics.
Site integrity goes down with plagiarism, use of formulaic content, high friction advertising, undisclosed affiliate marketing and spammy content.
AI Content
We are reviewing our position on AI content. Our original policy was, shall we say harsh. We are considering being less harsh. Some AI content, for instance AI generated images, we like. However a lot of AI generated text tends to be shallow and repetitive or formulaic. We prefer content with more depth and a point of view.
Back-Links
Our question here is: Do you think readers care about back-links? Did a reader ever say “It was a good article, but it didn’t have enough back-links.” We don’t think they care, so we don’t care about back links.
Multi-Page Posts
We have all seen those postings with lots of ads, a little content and a "next" button which leads to… We don’t have specific code to catch this, but given our content quantity and quantity calculations we do not expect them to rank well.
Headings
We don’t currently use headings (h1,h2..) elements as a ranking factor. We do use them to help display/promote blogs without images. This should attract more likes, views and subscriptions which will have a positive effect.