Dave Naffziger’s Blog

A month ago, I opened accounts at the three major hosted blog platforms (WordPress, Typepad & Blogger), and wrote two equivalent posts (similar titles and keyword densities) on each platform using made-up keywords. I also hosted a WordPress powered blog on a newly registered domain and created similar posts there (I recognize that this isn’t an entirely fair option because I didn’t do the same for all three platforms). I used all of the default options of the blog platforms.

I then monitored the search results for these fictitious keywords to see how quickly the posts would be indexed and how the posts would rank relative to each other.

The two terms I targeted were: patwrxa & qtyuist, and the four blogs I used were: patwrxa.com, patwrxa.wordpress.com, patwrxa.typepad.com, patwrxa.blogspot.com

1. Time to Indexing

The average time that it took for the posts to be first seen in the search engines . I didn’t include Live.com as it had only fully indexed one of the four sites (Typepad). I also tested and excluded Technorati, which never picked up the Typepad blog.

The rank is my qualitative assessment based on the data, my perception of the importance of the various engines, and how I saw the data change over the week. Yeah, I wish it was more scientific too, but you’ll have to deal.

I had several observations:

• Blogger gets content into Google’s index the quickest (not surprising)
• WordPress.com and Hosted WordPress were indexed similarly quickly
• Some posts jumped in and out of the index.
• I was surprised to find Typepad indexed slowly on Yahoo, and not at all on Google Blog Search.

Also notable: Yahoo is already struggling with spam on the search terms

2. Relative Ranking

Average Position calculated by taking the average of the two positional ranks.

A note on Yahoo’s numbers. The blogs indexed in Yahoo fluctuated a lot, so I have two numbers listed for Yahoo: the first is the present day rank. The second is the average rank when all pages were in the index (about a week ago). N/I means Not Indexed (Currently)

OK, these results were a lot less consistent between platforms and between search engines. I did notice several things:

• The blog on the domain patwrxa.com did the best for the keyword ‘patwrxa’.
• I didn’t see any major sandboxing issues with the new domain. Or, the blogs all faced similar sandbox issues.
• There seems to be an inverse relationship between rankings on Google Search and Google Blog Search. This may be coincidence.
• The rankings did bounce around a bit. The numbers I posted above are the current rankings and generally represented the steady state.

Summary - the Best Search Optimized Blog Platform?

WordPress. Although the assessment is more qualitative than quantitative. It is indexed quickly in all engines and ranks well in all engines. If you host your own version of WordPress, you’ll find the search performance to be similar (maybe even better) to a WordPress blog hosted on wordpress.com.

Disclaimer: Although I think it is informative, this is far from a scientific test. To properly conduct a test, you would need to create tens of blogs on each of the platforms and test each with real keywords in addition to the manufactured ones - time/skills that I definitely don’t have.