Why Your Blog Will Never Win Google’s Affection

I have a niche site. It’s about dogs .

As you might imagine, “dogs” is a popular topic amongst humans, so competition for search traffic is fierce.

No matter how hard I try, my little blog will never rank high on google’s search results. And here is why.

What’s Age Got To Do With It?

Domains like dogster.com, dog.com and wikipedia -which ranks high for pretty much any keyword/phrase- have been around FOREVER. My dog blog is only few years old, and this makes a TON of difference.

Being around for a long time means that:

  • You get a preferential treatment from google’s robotic sentinels
  • You’ve had time to allow for other sites to naturally link to you
  • You’ve had time to build credibility with google.

How to beat the system?

To make your short time on the scene work in your favor, there are few tricks you can employ that will compensate for your lack of longevity.

People are fascinated by “new”. New anything is infinitely more interesting than anything old. In fact, Western culture has an ingrained bias against old and in favor of new.

So be the kind of “new” that people want to write about and link to.

News Flash: If you can’t get on google’s front page as a proven long-term entity, why not get on google’s front page as news?

Start by asking yourself what is unique, interesting and newsworthy about you, and your actions will flow from the answers you come up with.

I would hate to be the kind of blogger that dispenses two dollar advice with no concrete example to show this working for me in real life, so here goes.

When Dan Cristo and I formed Triberr, we asked ourselves these same questions. The resultant torrent of links and write ups helped Triberr get ranked as one of the most visited sites on the Internet, according to Alexa.

To learn more, check out:

Content is Content

Google prefers new, unique and frequent content.

One-man-blog simply can’t satiate google’s thirst for content all by himself.

All the blogs that rank high in google’s mind, produce new, unique content and often. One man simply can’t keep up.

Think Wikipedia, Huffington Post, Mashable or any other, multi-author site. They publish and update their content dozens, hundreds and even thousands of times a day.

You want to win favor with google? You have to do the same thing.

How to beat the system?

You can’t do it by yourself. Certainly not in the long term. You WILL Peter out. So get some friends.

Individual blogs who try to rank based on the content created by one person will lose out. One person simply doesn’t have the creative output needed to feed the google’s robotic ghouls.

Collaborative blogs who publish a ton of new, original content will have the edge.

This is why I try to feature guest bloggers on DIYB as often as possible, and this is why the future of blogging belongs to collaboratively minded.

Contact me for your guest posting invite.

Sucks to be Competitive

If you’re writing about a less competitive -or new, see above- topic, then it gets little easier.

However, if you decide to write about a hyper competitive niche like dogs, SEO, Viagra, weight loss, making money online, or similar; then it gets WAY more difficult.

What’s the solution? Glad you asked…

How to beat the system?

Video. That’s how.

Google owns youtube and google loves video. If you make a half decent video about any of the above mentioned topics -along with some solid tags and keywords- chances are it will rank on the first or second page of google.

Many of the well established sites are way behind the curve in terms of video content and this is the chance new bloggers might have to break through the old clutter.

If you’re clueless about how exactly to make a video, I have an eBook with your name on it. Get Video Blogging Quickstart Guide and more.

  • What other obstacles do new blogs encounter in breaking through the established google clutter?
  • What are your best tips and tricks new bloggers can use to rank, and fast?