Chris Hooley’s -ThinkBait-

If you were Google, would you want to give blogs a decent chance to rank quicker than old news sites? Let’s say you could even tell the difference between a blog and a splog. Blogs are almost always fresh, relevant content from zealous users who have passion for a topic. It’s almost like news, but not quite.

Newspapers are generally trusted by Google. Let’s consider a few reason why, and lets see if it prevents a few bloggers from whining about why Google let’s newspaper sites rank better, or gives them too much trust.

Here’s a few good reasons newspapers rank better than you

• Newspapers have teams of reporters searching for the latest stories, and teams of writers reporting and breaking news. Bloggers are usually a one man show, and often re-report and spin topics recently reported from established news channels.
• Newspapers have been breaking stories since the dawn of the information age, bloggers just now are tapping into that power.
• Newspaper stories generally go through rounds of rewriting and editing to insure the content is accurate and perfectly presented. (I’m not suggesting it always comes out that way) They put a LOT of effort into the content. A lot.
• There are very few spam newspapers (lets call them spewspapers) screwing it up for the legit news sources and confusing robots as to what is real.
• People quickly link to major news pubs because they generally break stories first, and after years of developing their business and content distribution models, they have developed huge readership that dwarfs any blogger to date.

Moral of the story? If a newspaper article is ruling the SERPs on one of your money terms, maybe you need to improve your site. Maybe you can use a few of their strengths to improve your blog.

• Create something newsworthy (call it buzz marketing, linkbait, or whatever)
• Spend more time perfecting your content
• Write more succinctly and carefully, and edit each post before clicking “publish”
• Work a littler harder on your distribution channels
• Remove the clutter, or at least place it in a better spot (and know the difference between clutter, and buzz, and fun)
• Be an ancient domain with hundreds of thousands of backlinks :-p

Bloggers, we have the opportunity to do some big things here, but we can still learn a thing or two from the tried and true content distribution channels. Work a little harder on your site and eventually you will outrank your competition… the New York Times.