I've been noticing something interesting with Google lately - While the rankings of this site have been increasing, the number of search engine hits against blog entries has actually been dropping: A week ago several entries in this blog were among the first page results for a number of terms (albeit less common terms), whereas now they've virtually disappeared. Given that other parts of the site are still seeing significant search engine directed traffic (in fact more than ever), it clearly isn't anything site-wide.

What I suspect is that Google has started identifying content as blog/not blog, as has long been anticipated, and if it's perceived to be the former then it is de-valued a degree. Identification could be as simple as checking for a synchronized RSS, or elements like calendar controls and the like. If it looks like a blog, reads like a blog...

There is a legitimate reason for that sort of segregation: The promiscuous linking of bloggers has drowned out `traditional' content, so much so that many searches were going to blog entries that happened to mention something in passing, even in a content-free, largely useless manner, making the use of search engines a frustrating, less-effective exercise. Discussion groups have been flooded with commentary about evil bloggers polluting the Google rankings (blaming bloggers for what is, in essence, a search engine problem).

Naturally Google's first step was to give bloggers a `home' (the Google blog search), and step two, I suspect, is to start cleaning up the search results.

If this is true, on the one hand I'm happy about it - it means that every search result isn't going to return every random MSDN blogger that's highly ranked just for being a part of the conblogation, but on the other hand it punishes those who use a blog format as a content management system of sorts.

Anyways, because I like appearing in the search results, I've created a new category and have started checking off "best of" posts. Through the magic of two XSLT transforms against the RSS of that category, and a bit of customization, it's now being replicated in non-blog-form over at http://www.yafla.com/dennisforbes/index.html. I've SEO'd the path and file names, and of course set appropriate titles on the documents (given that it's a single item per file I can do this), so content will definitely see more seach love over there. The layout is a bit ugly right now, but given that it's just a templated, dynamic transform I'll clean that up when I get the time.