While the tools offered by Google are considered some of the easiest, and best integrated among the free software available, I am not directly referring to the services that it offers, rather the idea that your entire blog should run based off any one company that is trying to generate a profit by “selling” its services — convincing people to use its search engine, in this case.

The Premise

Your traffic initially solely is driven by Google search results.  People discover your site through search engines, looking for tips, content, and other forms of media, which they either discard, not finding anything of use, or bookmark, subscribe, or share the site with others, leaving you in a great position.  Your main goal, as a content creator, is to convince people that they need to subscribe, an arbitrary decision that you should make as soon as you start seeing traffic levels that exceed what you initially predicted, levels that will be able to continue growing.

What Google (and any other search engine does, for that matter), is deliver results to Internet users, based on queries that have been entered into the box.  The results are based on the relevance to the terms entered, then the user is able to select the result, influenced by keywords, titles, and URLs of the individual websites.  They do not rule your blog, determining how much money you make, what type of content you produce, or the types of visitors that you receive on your blog — these are all driven by your particular actions and how you present your blog.

Become Independent of all Search Engines

There is no step-by-step guide available to set you free of all search engines, but there are some key tips to help you advance your blog and learn that they are generally working against your blog and your much larger ambitions.

First, you have to rehearse your goals again in your head.  Like I previously mentioned in a previous post, your goals should stick with you, constantly molding and adapting to each step and progression that you make in your blogging adventure.  If you are working towards growing your subscriber, or community base, you’ll need to create several lead-in pages to ensure that you receive a greater click-thru rate and return rate for the time you spend doing these steps.

Each person (whether a direct visitor, referred from another site, or from search engines) you are able to get to subscribe to your blog is one less person that will be forced to search for your content from search engines, and one that is likely to visit or read your content nearly every day.

Secondly, everyone believes that traffic is the key to earning and growing your online business.  This is true, in a sense, as without traffic, your site is simply a compilation of text, images, and other media formats like video.  However, when you combine everything together, a site is a piece of inspiration for others, source of content for another individual, and income generator for you.  

Quality versus quantity is where all differences start.  Traffic from search engines is generally targeted, as someone is looking for that particular piece of information, but the results may not be the most relevant for his or her search.  Thus, the impact would be monumental in the amount of time this person would spend on your site.  When you are able to grow you quality traffic, you are able to exceed your month-over-month goals.

To drive traffic from search engines into people that visit your site directly, you need to focus directly on your brand and image.  The first place to start would be in your blog theme.  This is often the first element of what you have to offer that people see when they venture to your property.  Every site, even if just text, has a theme.  Make yours unique, standing out from the rest.  My theme is not the most unique, but I did customize a few elements of it to convey a strong message to visitors.

Next, use plugins that help readers stay connected with your site, including the social bookmarking buttons/drop-down lists, “forcing” your visitors to bookmark your content for a later time.  

Leverage the 10-75% of your visitors coming from search engines into visitors that respond well to your blog, instinctively knowing that you are the premier source for information - content that will stick with them, even after leaving your blog.  In another sense, you also want to encourage readers to continue returning, break apart content to garner a lower bounce rate, then focus on other areas down the road.

On Page Rank: This is simply a ranking system developed by Google to place more importance on more popular sites, although advertisers (who want links back to their websites) look at it as a more important measurement device.  Should you fear a drop in your rank, there are ways of recovering it, although you likely lost it because you were not fairly doing business on your blog.

Final Thoughts

Since blogging is one of the most difficult professions to get into, you must be aware that it takes a lot of time, months turning into years, until your blog is to the “authority” level that you wanted it to reach.  Once you reach this level, you can literally become independent of other traffic generation services, including Google, Yahoo, Live, Ask, and the other smaller sources.  At this point, you’ll be able to further leverage this control on your blog and draw in return visitors — results that many bloggers strive for day in and day out.

If you try using a Page Rank prediction or verification service that gathers data from multiple data centers, you may find that it won’t work.  This update will primarily be displayed in the Google Toolbar, if you are using it.  

Despite the popularity of using Page Rank as a determining factor of a site’s value (and advertising prices), it should never be used solely to determine a blog’s popularity.  Practice good blogging and you’ll see more benefits than simply an increase in your rank.

Has your Page Rank increased or decreased?  Does Page Rank matter to you?  Generally, the blogs that have mentioned the update have seen a 1-3 rank increase.  

It’ll be fairly easy to include your blog in these search engines, with a simple pinging setup or an RSS feed submission.  However, a few of these approach the definition of being a blog directory, which wasn’t my intention of highlighting.

The blog-dedicated search engines listed below help searchers discover new blogs and resources, as well as keeps them updated on their favorite bloggers.

1. Google Blog Search - blogsearch.google.com (Google-styled) or search.blogger.com (Blogger-styled)
   • About: Both search engines have the same search results, however they feature a slightly different interface.  Results include all blogs, in addition to those published through Blogger and results are continually updated in various languages.  Advanced search also provided.
   • Languages supported: English, French, Italian, German, Spanish, Korean, Brazilian Portuguese, Dutch, Russian, Japanese, Swedish, Malay, Polish, Thai, Indonesian, Tagalog, Turkish, Vietnamese, and others.Getting your blog listed: Follow instructions provided on the Blog Search Pinging Service page, but most blogs are automatically added using pinging services built into the blog platform.
   • Other info: Includes blogs dating to around June 2005, PR: 7 (Google version); 3 (Blogger version)



2. Ask Blogs Search - http://blogsearch.ask.com
   • About: Includes various options from the Bloglines data with the search technology of ExpertRank and Ask.com.  The results also feature the ability to show results sorted by date, popularity, or relevance, by posts, feeds, or news.  Binoculars shows a preview of the last five posts from a feed and you are able to easily subscribe and post the feeds/search results as you find them, for future reference.
   • Languages supported: Ask.com sites include U.S., Deutschland, Espana, France, Italia, Japan, Nederland, and UK.
   • Getting your blog listed: No specific instructions listed, likely automatic, generated form web results.
   • Other info: Launched in June 2006, PR: 8



3. Technorati Blog Search - search.technorati.com (separate page) or technorati.com/search (integrated version)
   • About: As the leader in blog tracking, Technorati allows you to keep track of blog news, pingbacks/trackbacks, and who favorites your blog, using the search engines provided.  Advanced search also available.
   • Languages supported: Worldwide, primarily targets U.S. market.
   • Getting your blog listed: You must first create an account or configure your publishing tool/ping configurations.
   • Other info: Currently tracking 100+ million blogs, PR: 4-5



4. Blog Search - blog-search.com
   • About: Blog Search is owned by Jayde and incorporated in 1998.  The blog search serves as a source for searching blogs, adding your own blog, or grabbing an RSS feed on the blog topic of your choice.  Includes more than 17,000 blogs.
   • Languages supported: Unknown, primarily English.
   • Getting your blog listed: You must become a member to submit your blog/RSS feed.
   • Other info: Catalogues blogs by category (directory-like), PR: 3



5. Ice Rocket Blog Search - icerocket.com
   • About: IceRocket is a privately owned and operated search engine has innovative blog search technology to search the blogosphere.  On the main page, you’ll find several areas to discover the top videos, movies, searches, and other various tools under the IceRocket name. 
   • Languages supported: Primarily English, as the company is based in Texas.
   • Getting your blog listed: Enter your URL to be indexed or include the ping address in your XML-RPC area of your weblog software.
   • Other info: PR: 6



6. Blog Search Engine - blogsearchengine.com
   • About: Blog Search Engine is a search engine of blogs, using the Google Blog Search bar.  It presents you with more than ten million blogs which are relevant toy our search queries.
   • Languages supported: Primarily English.
   • Getting your blog listed: Automatically added if you have been added to the Google Blog Search previously.
   • Other info: The site occasionally reviews other high quality blogs from around the world, PR: 4



7. Blogdigger - blogdigger.com
   • About: Blogdigger provides several areas of blog content search types such as by date, relevance, links, media, groups, and local.  A toolbar is also available for quicker access to the services.
   • Languages supported: Primarily English.
   • Getting your blog listed: No specific instructions provided.
   • Other info: PR: 7



8. Bloglines Blog Search - bloglines.com/search
   • About: Bloglines provides a number of free online services for searching, subscribing, creating, and sharing news feeds, blogs, and rich web content.  Their blog search allows you to search for posts, feeds, citations, or the web, in coordination with Ask.com’s search technologies.
   • Languages supported: Worldwide, focused on English blogs.
   • Getting your blog listed: Likely will already be included, but has more specific results if you have an account.
   • Other info: PR: 8



9. BlogPulse - blogpulse.com
   • About: BlogPulse is an automated trend discovery system for blogs, owned by Nielsen BuzzMetrics.  BlogPulse combines a search engine that analyzes and reports on daily activity in the blogosphere and includes a set of Buzz-Tracking tools, a look at world trends, daily blog stats, a trend search, a conversation tracker, blogger profiles, as well as a showcase of tools for bloggers.
   • Languages supported: Worldwide, once again focused on English blogs.
   • Getting your blog indexed: Blogs are indexed at most once per day, you must first add it on the submission page.
   • Other info: PR: 7



10. BlogScope - blogscope.net
    • About: BlogScope is an analysis and visualization tool for the blogosphere which is being developed as part of a research project at the University of Toronto.  It currently tracks more than twenty-one million blogs with 241.09 million posts.  It offers numerous unique features including popularity curves, identification of information bursts, related themes, and geographical search.
    • Languages supported: English, others also supported, except images use English text.
    • Getting your blog indexed: Blogs indexed semi-automatically as widgets may get your blog indexed more quickly.
    • Other info: PR: 5



11. Plazoo Blog Search - plazoo.com
    • About: Plazoo is a term that means “a place to search”, and allows you to search for content across multiple blog categories and displays the latest news on the main page form top news blogs.
    • Languages supported: (based in the Netherlands) - Czech, Dutch, English, French, German, Polish, and Russian
    • Getting your blog indexed: Submit your blog on the submission page.
    • Other info: PR: 6, more of a directory

More information can be found here.

Beginning in June of 2007, Google changed their algorithm, making more recent articles from blogs, in particular, appear at the top of the search results. Since then, more lower-quality (spam) pages began displaying more frequently than higher-ranked pages such as Wikipedia. Before this change, new blog posts took much longer to be displayed, often hours, and today blog posts will be displayed within a few minutes. Page Rank, which is an important factor in determining the ranking of sites, is almost completely disregarded with the speed sites are being listed at. 

Many saw a huge flaw in the algorithm with Google’s latest logo linking to results for the twenty-five year anniversary of in the invention of TCP/IP. The first result was for a Digg page linking to the second result, which is a spam blog set up simply to take advantage of the flaws. Out of the first ten results, only one consists of a fairly decent non-spam result, with the Wikipedia article appearing on the second page.

Perhaps Google will realize the greater problems this created, tweaking their search algorithm to include both recent and higher ranked/older pages. Possibly create further distinction between them - instead of simply listing the date. Other ideas may be to create a ‘Recently Added’ or similar tab as in the case of the blog search. For now you’ll just have to modify your searching to ‘January 1 tcp/ip+wikipedia’.

[via: Google Operating System]

AOL - A simple flash animation of the ball dropping and some confetti. 

Ask - Balloons line the top of the search page. Later, they used flash to animate the page with the balloons located at the bottom and ‘happy new year-related’ balloons falling from the top. Youtube video courtesy Search Engine Roundtable. 

Dogpile - The Dogpile mascot celebrating the new year. 

Google - As usual, Google used a logo change integrating the holiday into their name. The logo also celebrates the milestone invention (TCP/IP) leading to the modern internet which was invented on January 1, 1983. 

Yahoo! - Yet another flash animation of the characters celebrating the new year. 

Ask has a themed page with falling snow and ornaments.

Dogpile also has a full-page theme with a ‘Santa dog’ graphic.

Entireweb redesigned their logo with a winter theme.

Google’s logo will likely be in a series of logos, as was done in previous years.

Lycos used a holiday/snow theme for their header page, although it is slightly less noticeable than other search engine’s designs. 

Yahoo! once again used an animated logo featuring a snowman, gifts, and characters.

Sample Holiday Gadgets
 

All holiday desktop gadgets are available through the holiday gadget page.

From Google Technology:

Introduction

Google runs on a unique combination of advanced hardware and software. The speed you experience can be attributed in part to the efficiency of our search algorithm and partly to the thousands of low cost PC’s we’ve networked together to create a super fast search engine.

The heart of our software is PageRank, a system for ranking web pages developed by our founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin at Stanford University. And while we have dozens of engineers working to improve every aspect of Google on a daily basis, PageRank continues to play a central role in many of our web search tools.

 

PageRank Explained

PageRank relies on the uniquely democratic nature of the web by using its vast link structure as an indicator of an individual page’s value. In essence, Google interprets a link from page A to page B as a vote, by page A, for page B. But, Google looks at considerably more than the sheer volume of votes, or links a page receives; for example, it also analyzes the page that casts the vote. Votes cast by pages that are themselves “important” weigh more heavily and help to make other pages “important.” Using these and other factors, Google provides its views on pages’ relative importance.

Of course, important pages mean nothing to you if they don’t match your query. So, Google combines PageRank with sophisticated text-matching techniques to find pages that are both important and relevant to your search. Google goes far beyond the number of times a term appears on a page and examines dozens of aspects of the page’s content (and the content of the pages linking to it) to determine if it’s a good match for your query.

 

Integrity

Google’s complex automated methods make human tampering with our search results extremely difficult. And though we may run relevant ads above and next to our results, Google does not sell placement within the results themselves (i.e., no one can buy a particular or higher placement). A Google search provides an easy and effective way to find high-quality websites that contain information relevant to your search.

In summary:

•  Page rank is a link analysis algorithm that assigns a numerical weighting to each element of a hyperlinked set of documents, such as the World Wide Web, with the purpose of “measuring” its relative importance within the set.
• It was developed by the creators of Google starting in 1995.
• One of many factors determining the ranking of search results, and continues to provide the basis for all of Google’s web search tools.
• PR0 is a relatively new page with no links, PR10 are popular sites with many links, typically directories and search engines.
• After about 4+ months most new sites see their page rank increase if they have been properly linking.
• Page Rank typically updates once a quarter.

Simple Steps to Getting a Higher Page Rank

1. Submit your site to the Dmoz directory. While there is criticism surrounding the way Dmoz determines sites to add, it is a key factor in raising your Page Rank. However, it may take between 2 weeks to a few months to get your site listed. Be sure that you write a good description of your site, have quality content, and make everything clear in the description.
2. Enable “do follow” on your blogs. This can help increase the amount of readers leaving a comment on your blog, plus it is a win-win situation, as you will probably receive added traffic, and everyone will gain a little page rank.
3. Buy text links on high ranking sites. This isn’t free but it is often effective. Browse sites, check their PR, then see what the cost of links or ads are.
4. Exchange links on high ranking sites or blogs. Although generally free, it quickly creates clutter on your blog - making it unattractive for visitors. Create a “Links” or similarly named page to manage the links.
5. Create content-rich posts and make your site as SEO friendly as possible.

Tools to Check Your Page Rank

• PRChecker.info - Allows you to add an icon (70×20, 88×31, or 80×15 pixels) to your website, displaying your PR.
• iWeb Tool Page Rank Checker - Checks your website on about 37 major Google data centers instantly, displaying possible variations in the PR. Also allows you to save results in an Excel (CSV), Text, create a link to your results, or add the tool to your site.
• iWeb Tool Future Page Rank Checker - As long as your site has at least 100 backlinks, this site will predict future a site’s future rank.
• Google Toolbar - Available for Firfox and Internet Explorer, the toolbar instantly displays PR for any site you visit as well as offers other helpful tools.

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