The 2 more dated posts are on Google’s official blogs. It is hard to rank against Google, even if they don’t have all the words in the title.

It does appear that a lot of weight is placed on the title – a lesson for us all to pay close attention to the title. I noticed this post appears at #4 on blogsearch for “blog search” (one more recent, two dated.)

All things being equal (which they never seem to be), I should always outrank Techcrunch or Problogger when discussing something like Blogsearch, but there are other factors, as you can see by the fact that Alister’s blogsearch post on Problogger.net is still outranking my post with an almost identical title (though it does have more words in it)

All things aren’t equal and there are lots of factors which would mean that a post on Darren’s blog would rank higher, despite Darren not using things like tagging.

1. Pagerank – Darren’s toolbar pagerank is 7, my toolbar pagerank is 5 – those are 3 months out of date, so Darren might be approaching PR8 now, and I might be approaching PR6, but that is impossible to accurately predict.
2. Links – without doubt Alister’s post generated a lot of links – Google seem to see these faster than for the main index, although that doesn’t mean they give a weighting immediately.
3. Maybe I am wrong on Digg – It is my belief it isn’t used as a ranking factor, but it gives a huge amount of traffic which might be a factor. I don’t post how many views my posts get, but whilst that post did get more views than Alisters got Diggs, due to some solid SU traffic, I would estimate Alisters post was seen by 20x the number of people, both on site and in feeds.

4. I referenced Alister’s post and his was written 1 day before my own, thus in part, I am making Alister relevant. Whilst all the other blogs are falling away, I had existing historical relevance, thus that link might be the most powerful link that Alister’s post received on this subject.

On a fairly recent post on Tony Hung’s blog about A-listers, RObert Scoble mentioed that he could probably rank for Lawnmowers.
He probably could, especially if he got some links to make him relevant.

It has been a few days since the original posts, and longevity ranking is kicking in. Lots of blogs have dropped and are being replaced by newer posts commenting on Alister’s.
The Lisa’s post on the Bruce Clay blog has also disappeared.

Nothing can be equal, but certainly for Blogsearch I am fairly confident that I can rank consistently high for topics I discuss.

Did you notice I didn’t use “Blogsearch” in the title of this post? It didn’t appear in the search results for “Blogsearch” at all, because the title really is the biggest factor currently.

We will see how the longevity goes…

Interesting write up.

I noticed that a lot of people attributed that article to Darren – it must be really frustrating. As you say, so many bloggers don’t take the time to do a just little bit of research. I’ve discovered that myself this week.

Do you think the fact that Alister’s post has received 600+ diggs has any influence on where the posts rank (I know you previously stated that it wouldn’t count)? Or is it purely the number of people that linked to the post?

Also interested in why you were so confident that you would “outrank” Alister’s post (and you know I’m not being snippy here – just curious)!

A while back, in response to a post on Beta Blogger 4 Dummies, we removed the “nofollow” attribute from our html code to allow search spiders to find comments posted here.

The “do follow” movement has picked up steam in a major way. Randa Clay c…

The link that is currently here just contains the standard rel=nofollow and add ons.

I’ll probably blog on it later or over the weekend.

p.s loving the reply to comment option here Andy

The plugin is buried a little in the comments, I might encourage him to post about it, but I want to stick it on my sidebar first.

If you also use his Tumbleweed plugin, that is one of many alternatives to increasing the number of internal links.

I will be adding that as well, and the 3rd plugin for showing posts you might have missed.

I also use dynamic growing links on my single pages which get all the comments. The number of tags increases with each comment left to even things out a little on popular posts.