Since this past Saturday, more than 70% of the traffic coming to my personal website has been from Googlers searching for terms like “hPod” or “blue hPod”. Apple announced new iPods on Monday, and then verified that they were producing an HP-branded blue iPod based on the 4th generation model they just came out with. So why is this so amazing?
Weblogs are chock full of archived information, and when I wrote about the HP iPod (or hPod for short) rumor, I wrote about it back in January (my site is currently being redesigned live, so please forgive me!). That little page has been dormant for 7 months, but just sprang to life upon the thousands of Googlers who clicked on the link in the search results.
The Googlebot visits my site dozens of times per day because I update it very frequently. It may visit your site once or twice a week, or it may visit your site 20 times per hour – it all depends on your PageRank figure and how often you update it. Some have said that weblogs are ruining Google search results, but I feel the opposite is true. If breaking news just happened 30 minutes ago, and you want the latest news, it’s not going to be a full-blown New York Times article yet. If it’s not national news, then CNN won’t be covering it. So you turn to Google, and find that a few bloggers have already written down the facts, added their $ .02, and packaged it nicely on their website. Instant gratification.
If a weblog pops up on the first page of Google results, there’s a reason for it. It’s not just there because they happen to have written about your query, it’s there because of the hundreds or thousands of people who have linked to that weblog in the past, thus validating its credibility and reliability. If a thousand people link to a weblog and think that it is a worthwhile resource for news, then guess what? In my opinion, it is a valid news source.
