Why Does Google Care About My Blog?
This podcast audio served as the source for the blog post “Google Cares About Your Blog.”
The transcript was rewritten to produce the blog post, which is the cornerstone of the Shortcut Content system.
Shayla: Thank you for joining us for the Shortcut Content Podcast. I’m talking with Dave Young who is the founder of Shortcut Content. Dave, this is a pretty simple question, but I don’t know if it’s a simple question. Why does Google care our blogs?
Dave: Why does Google care? Google wants to know you’re alive and kicking. It reminds me of the movie Get Shorty and Gene Hackman’s character makes kind of an off-hand comment about asking a literary agent, “what’s the most profitable kind of writing?” or the writing that pays the best, and the answer was “random notes.” That’s the kind of writing that pays the most. And consider your blog the proof-of-life that a kidnapper often has to give to the person that’s trying to round the money. You see that in movies and all the crime shows on TV. Somebody kidnaps someone, and before we give a half million dollars in ransom money, you have to prove that that person is still alive, right?
So Google thinks about your blog the same way. In fact, they think about your whole website that way. Before Google sends you a bunch of traffic that you’d like to have come to your site, they’d like to know that you’re still alive. So the way you show Google that you’re still alive is you make changes to your website. You update static pages, and if you have a blog that’s on the same domain as your website, which is where I think it ought to be, we see people now and then that still have their blog on a subdomain and Google treats that as entirely different site. So they may think that your blog is alive, but your website isn’t. I like having the blog right on the same domain, just with a change in the URL. So when you’re constantly updating, you’re telling Google, “We’re alive and kicking! Look, see, we just wrote something new.” And the more often you write things that are new and put them on your blog, the more often Google comes around and checks to see if there’s anything else that’s new.
So if you’re updating your site or you blog once a week, you can count on Google to start indexing your site a little more often. And the more Google indexes your site, the better off you’re going to be doing at having traffic that’s coming, based on the content that you’re writing, even if it’s not just rich in keywords, Google’s pretty good at figuring out the context and, especially if people are sharing or linking to it, it doesn’t take too long for Google to at least know that you’re alive and kicking and it’s okay for them to send some content. They’re not going to disappoint searchers by sending them to your site, if it’s relevant to the content that the searchers are looking for and, of course, if your site is alive. So think about your site as proof-of-life to Google, so Google can go ahead and put together ransom money for you.
Shayla: That would be nice. I think what a lot of people run into is they run of idea to blog about. I mean, you’re talking about blogging pretty often, right?
Dave: Yeah, if you’re going to blog every week and you’ve run out of things to talk about, we do have a really cool exercise. It takes you less than an hour. And if you fill out the exercise completely, you’ll end up with 64 topics by the end of about 45 minutes. You print out this 6-page PDF and it’s full blank lines, and you get instructions that tell you exactly what to do and how to think about it. It uses a little mental trick that we will talk about inside the exercise when you get it started, but it’s almost a miracle to some people. I actually sat down with a local group here in Tucson, Arizona, where my office is, I sat down with a group of women bloggers last week, and we went through the exercise in person, we were just in a little meeting room in a Greek restaurant here in town, and they loved it. They all came away with way more than a year’s worth of topics that they could then just sit down and write. And that’s really the important thing is that you, if you’re going to blog every week or every month, or twice a week, whatever pace your’e going to keep, having a list of ideas ready is pretty important. It gets one of the biggest hurdles out of the way.
Shayla: It’s really half the battle, right? So if you guys want to find that brainstorming exercise, you’ll find it at shortcutcontent.com. Also on the website there’s lots of other good information, Shortcut Content’s blog, you’ll find this podcast there, and if you any more questions, feel free to reach out to Dave.