How Blogs Can Hurt Your Search Traffic
Back in the early days of the Web, the amount of websites being added was mind blowing. It felt like the Web was growing every second, and that’s because it was. I don’t know if anyone expected that it would slow, but it obviously hasn’t. Now the Web has a new source of content, blogs.
When you look at what a blog really is, you will see very little difference from the old Geocities personal pages. These are just simple to use pages for people to publish their personal content. But what blogs has done is productized the process, thereby accelerating the growth of the Web at a record pace.
What does this have to do with search traffic? Competition. Simply put, there are more pages to compete with for search terms. Google has done an excellent job at continuing to make sure that the most relevant pages are returned for search queries, but what happens when these relevant pages become more and more common, and competitive? The answer is the traffic is split. How you may still rank for terms that are vital to your business, it is likely the traffic you will lose is the ancillary exposure you enjoyed from derivative terms. These can lead to a splitting of relevant links due to the loss of visibility.
Add to this that most blog platforms are designed by their very nature to be easily spidered by search engines (Blogger is actually owned by Google), and the effects are easy to see. Overall, the increase of blogs is going to hurt most sites search traffic.
So, how do you use this to your advantage? The answer is easy; you must have a blog of you own. The only way to keep competitive is to maintain your own daily content, and make sure that your blog has all the advantages the blogging platforms bring. Leveraging RSS, tags, and Web Standards.
USWeb of course recommends their corporate blog management program, but even if you just use Blogger, you need to create a blog to keep moving forward in search engine optimization.