Does Google Hate WordPress and Other Blog Platforms?
I don’t know why I did it, I guess I was just bored, but for some reason I decided to Google the term: blog to see what kind of results I would get. WordPress, TypePad or any other blog publishing platform is not mentioned on the first page results. In fact, the top ten results for the term blog have three instances that promote or have an direct affiliation with Google.
The number one result is Blogger.com. The number three spot has the Official Google Blog and then the number nine spot is held for Matt Cutt’s blog.
The above screen shot was taken incognito, logged out of iGoogle using Google Chrome.
I thought for sure that if I logged into iGoogle and did the same search over, but allowing the results to be personalized based on my web history, then for sure the top ten list would have WordPress.org at least WordPress.com in the top ten. I mean, I have only been allowing Google to keep a record of my web history for almost two years now, and WordPress.org is probably one of my Top 10 Most Visited Sites.
Sure enough, I did the search over again and indeed my results varied slightly, but guess what? Still no mention of WordPress.com or WordPress.org. Why? If these results were personalized based on my web history, then surly WordPress.org or WordPress.com would pull up on the top ten for the word blog. But guess what? It doesn’t.
Once again, we have the same three results as before, but in a slightly different order. Blogger.com remained #1 even though I never visit it. Matt Cutt’s blog jumped from #9 spot to #3 and the Official Google Blog went from #3 to #5. And as mentioned, there is no listing for WordPress.com, WordPress.org or even something remotely alternative such as TypePad.
Finally, I thought to myself, “Well, if Google doesn’t list WordPress in the top ten of the SERP then for sure they will suggest it as an alternative search term:
I was wrong again. Instead, Google suggests that I search for music blog, blog stuff, funny blog, msn blog, fashion blog, technorati, radio blog or dilbert blog.
Maybe I am just over critical. For sure if I type: Create a Blog into Google I will find WordPress.
Wrong again… In fact, this time is it much worse. This SERP has THREE instances of Blogger.com. Three out of Ten listings are Blogger.com.
So I ask you this, does Google hate WordPress and other blog platforms? And the second question I want to ask is if Google is supposedly providing results in the SERPs based off my web history, how come when I am logged into iGoogle the results don’t seem very personalized? Leave a comment with your thoughts, because I really want to know what you think on this one.
EDIT: By the way, I figured that this would be a good article to submit into the Sphinn community, since this network consists of a super huge cluster of SEOs. I figured, it would be a good idea to get their take on this. If you wouldn’t mind, hook me up with a vote, assuming that you did enjoy reading this article and the comments within:
http://sphinn.com/story/81381
Popularity: 3% [?]
56 comments
Definitely blogger blogs will rank higher because Google owns it.
Check out Hussein’s last blog post..Clean Green WordPress Theme v1
I can understand higher. But what about failing to provide diversity? For those who never heard of the word blog up until when a friend tells them about it during lunch, and go home to search for it, they will never see or learn about WordPress. Perhaps, that is why we always hear the common story about, “When I started blogging, my first blog was a Blogger.com blog and boy I sure had a fun time trying to migrate over to WordPress.”
To me, it just seems strange that Google fails to mention WordPress in the places that I think it would be rather important to do so.
It doesn’t surprise me, but it is a very good observation to report on, thanks.
My big complaint with them is feedburner. For some damn reason they keep resetting ALL of my feeds for ALL of my sites to zero.
It is not easy to get a hold of anyone there and they want you to post your questions on the forums, and then some ass hole calls you an ass hole. Who needs that?
Just when I finally mastered how to use feedburner and rss they keep resetting me. Grumble…
Hey Garry, for what it is worth and I know that opinions don’t sway you much, but I REALLY like this theme and header that you are using this five minutes! It looks very professional, educational and no carnival effect. IMHO.
All the best.
Rich Hill
Check out Rich Hill’s last blog post..New Contest Online Register for Free Prizes
Yeah I reckon it’s just google love their own products more. It’s just cross promotion really you see it on TV all the time. I doubt they are penalizing wordpress it’s just being knocked off the front page because they make sure the algorithms are beneficial to their own products.
YES, the results you provided speak from themselves.
ciao
alex
I really haven’t seen any evidence that Google favors Blogspot blogs. I am not sure why the Google SERPs do not highlight WordPress blogs, but I dont think that it is manually penalizing them. GOogle is in the business of making its search results the most relevant, best results. Search is where Google makes its money.
Check out Fred @ MMO Explorer’s last blog post..Fixing Warhammer Open RvR
I wonder if someone at WP should know…surely they are big enough to at least have a little chat with G
LOL
Check out Dennis Edell’s last blog post..50 Social Bookmarking Sites. What Are The Top 5-10 Most Popular?
I’m not at all surprised. Google has done nothing but disappoint me for the past year and a half now. I used to be a Google fan, but lately things are more about the almighty google dollar than the benefits of the internet, somehow they got all turned around and backwards.
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Hi Rich,
The sites that are having these issues. Typically what is the average number of subscribers prior to going to 0?
LOL… Indeed, the wonderful joys of asking a question on a message board. I just wrote a post asking if read my blog makes people feel stupid, and I have to say that there is noting that makes people feel more stupid than posts a question in a support messageboard. People in there were make fun of you, scold you for asking the question, tell you to use the search bar that doesn’t provide accurate results, ect. I feel your pain.
Thanks man, that is actually worth a lot. It seems that majority of the people who left feedback regarding my 30 day challenge NOT to change my theme, said positive things about the current design.
Hi Kiri,
Welcome to my blog and thanks for taking the time to leave a comment with your thoughts.
I would call that a penalty, wouldn’t you? That is unless, WordPress shouldn’t be on these pages. Would everyone agree that WordPress should be on these pages? Maybe it’s me and I am simply off base?
yeah, that’s kind of what I was thinking. Thanks for letting me know where you stand on that.
Thanks for sharing. Search engine optimization is indeed one of the most crucial areas in Internet marketing, it is a perfect bridge between technology and business.
Hi Fred!
Thanks for contributing your insight on this. I agree, when it comes to reviewing the SERPs on the many search terms I look at, amazingly there is a high percentage of blogs that pull up in the top ten. Secondly, most of those blogs that do pull up in the SERPs are WordPress and rarely Blogger.com blogs.
So, here is the angle that I am taking and from there, I invite you or anyone to share thoughts on it. Would it be odd to consider that Google might not want people to use WordPress assuming that WordPress is very powerful and it is something that Google can’t control very well in their algorithm?
Would Google prefer that new publishers use Blogger.com blogs in an attempt to exercise “SERP Damage Control” due to the simple observation that publishers, at times, are totally taking over the SERPs with results hosted on self-hosted WordPress blogs?
Again, while there is no penalty for content written on WordPress, I am looking more along the lines of the front end of how WordPress is presented to people in Google via the search terms that people type whom may be interested in setting up a blog for the very first time.
Hi Dennis,
Google owns the Internet and even the biggest and most powerful companies bow down to Google. I don’t think there is anything that the key and founding developers can do or say to cause Google to make any profound changes quickly.
My thoughts are that if Google feels that this is something that should be changed, they will slowly change it over time so that their correction isn’t largely visible.
Hi Garry. It is a bit strange. The Alexa ranking for Blogspot is 9, and Wordpress (dot com) is 28. Maybe they need to apply a bit of SEO!
A search for ‘blog software’ places wordpress at number three though.
Check out Simon Harrison’s last blog post..Why you should learn Colemak
Hi Loretta,
Thanks for taking the time to leave me a comment sharing your thoughts. You expressed that Google has disappointed you for over the past year and a half.
One thing that I would like to pick your brain about is this:
Can you or anyone else who agrees with this, tell me more about how you have come to have this opinion? I would like to hear more of the experiences that lead people to have this perception.
One easy answer. Google is taking over
-Mike
It’s the golden rule – Google has the gold and that means they get to make the rules.
Check out Kathy @ Virtual Impax’s last blog post..Achieve Success While Maintaining a Healthy Work Life Balance
By the way, I figured that this would be a good article to submit into the Sphinn community, since this network consists of a super huge cluster of SEOs. I figured, it would be a good idea to get their take on this.
If you wouldn’t mind, hook me up with a vote, assuming that you did enjoy reading this article and the comments within:
http://sphinn.com/story/81381
I have never been impressed with their SEO talent, in fact whenever they do something right, it almost seems to be by mistake. They typically fall into the trap Google sets that if you have a good IA, that there is no point to SEO.
I’ve observed that, but I always thought it was because WP was caught spamming in ‘05 and just never recovered – or didn’t need to because by then they were popular enough to overtake WP.
Danny Sullivan wrote about it here and includes in his analysis a reference to the term “blog software” before and after they were caught.
http://blog.searchenginewatch.com/blog/050331-211635
And it’s true, in every evaluation I’ve done, WP blogs on the publisher’s server out scores blogspot, hands down. with the exception being the use of the Blogger.com to publish a blog on one’s own servers,
As mentioned, this seems to simply be an SEO thing. “get a blog” “blog tool” “free blog” all turn up WordPress (and other platforms) with decent results.
I assume you are referring to Wordpress when you say “I have never been impressed with their SEO talent” and I might agree with you there.
However, it seems many new bloggers disregard learning anything about IA and then expect you to be able to wave a magic SEO wand and fix systems that are crippled at the foundation level such as a poorly developed Wordpress Theme.
Check out David Cooley’s last blog post..Fix A Wordpress Blog With One Click
Yes, I was referring to Automattic
Interesting observations, but why the search query “blog”? That’s a tough one because of all of the anchor text out there “blog” pointing to people’s blogs (see my blog, the blog, etc). Remember anchor text has a good weight for broad search queries like that.
I can see Google forcing it’s properties to appear in SERPs it doesn’t organically deserve…. such as “blog” for blogger. They’ve admitted in the past they will do this… to promote their products. So look past the appearance of blogger, and focus on why Wordpress etc might not rank for these search terms you tested. I don’t see big surprises.
Take a look at “blog software” and you see b2 and wordpress.org, as you might expect. “blog service” shows typepad and wordpress.com, as expected. “blogging software” shows Wordpress.com and .org, typepad, etc.
Check out john andrews’s last blog post..Google’s Brand Arrogance & Typo Domains Revisited
The “naughty” pages were on WordPress.org not .com, and I spend a lot of time studying ranking performance of various parts of the WordPress.com domain – I can’t see anything that would be a penalty, their front page just isn’t optimized well.
I think the biggest problem however are the spammy links “Blog at WordPress.com” on millions of blogs. It kind of wipes out the editorial votes, the word “blog” might have been removed from their link text profile, if Google do such a thing.
I typed in “publishing platform” and Wordpress showed up on the front page for me.
Same as “start a blog”.
See, Wordpress itself isn’t really linked to with the word “blog”, and it hasn’t really been related – I write in my blog, I post a blog. WP is the blog platform, the software behind it all.
And yeah, they haven’t really targeted the word “blog” to give those results.
I don’t think Google hates Wordpress, I think it *loves* Wordpress blogs. Every one I’ve set up has had no troubles getting indexed.
Check out Andrea_R’s last blog post..Manually upgrading to version 2.6.3
Also, many Wordpress users use Adsense which makes Google money. That reason alone would seem to conclude that Google wouldn’t want to penalize Wordpress. However, I don’t think they will give them any special attention either. So I think it really has to do with Wordpress just not being optimized for the phrase in question.
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@Andy, I realize – this article said “wordpress.com or wordpress.org” – so I figured maybe they never recovered? It’s my best guess, not based on something scientific.
Having a quick scan on ANY google result will show that they favour their own services and PAID services, free and opensource services homepages rank pretty low compared to paid alternatives and sites reviewing said opensource, possibly as mooted due to less SEO basis to promote their business.
Commercial aspects would try to maximise it while free services wouldn’t.
This combination of own service and money making service ranking higher then wordpress could be a reason for its low ranking but you never know.
I see this topic has been removed by a moderator on sphinn (not sure why), by the way, so your sphinn link above doesn’t work anymore. Just an fyi.
Hi Burgo,
Thanks for letting me know. I realized this. Apparently I broke a rule in their TOS when I asked my readers to vote on the story assuming that they enjoyed it. Hmm… I guess we live and learn. I’ll admit though, I am quite upset about this.
I had some time invested into this and also one thing that I think Sphinn.com is failing to see is that I actively promoting them and spoke very HIGH of their community OFFLINE via my private member’s only mailing list and in instant messenger chat with friends. Oh well, needless to say, I don’t think I will be investing too much time over there anymore.
Here is a copy of the email that I sent out to my mailing list, just in case anyone wants to learn from my mistake:
Hmmm… it’s a tricky line in the TOS then. I see many sphinn users asking people for sphinns through other mediums (twitter, for example)… so hopefully a sphinn mod will chime in here on where that line is drawn.
Check out Burgo’s last blog post..Amiestreet and Brett Dennen – Hope for the Hopeless
We’ll see.
So here is a copy of the contact form message I just sent into Sphinn.com, let’s see what they have to say:
…For Google Alerts
@ Rob Kerry, Sphinn Editor
@ Danny Sullivan, Sphinn Editor-At-Large
@ Michelle Robbins, Sphinnmaster
… and @Moderators:
Brent Csutoras (BrentCsutoras)
Vanessa Fox (vanessafox)
Michael Gray (graywolf)
Rebecca Kelley (squishee)
Matt McGee (MattMcGee)
Jeff Quipp (jeffquipp)
Barry Schwartz (rustybrick)
Mikkel deMib Svensen (demib)
Tamar Weinberg (tamar)
Chris Winfie
I was curious to discover why my story was taken off Sphinn. Also, I wanted to find out why my original account: garryconn was removed from the system quite a few months ago. I’d appreciate a response back on this. Once again, thanks in advanced for your time.
Best Regards,
Garry Conn
What a great post. I would never have even thought of looking for something like this on Google, yet the results pose some great questions (which have been answered by just as equally great comments).
You’d like to think that there is no “hidden agenda”, but in a world where Google is exerting an ever stronger grip, you have to wonder. Funny how everyone jumped on Microsoft’s back when Windows was seen as a monopoly, but Google seems to be escaping this. Maybe if they peed off Mac owners…
Just as a side note, I run both a WP.com and WP.org blog and I’ve never had any problems achieving top rankings on Google for posts, so I don’t think it’s the WP platform as such. As Andy Beard mentioned, perhaps they just need to work on their own SEO a little bit?
Check out Danny Brown’s last blog post..So What, I’m Still a Rock Star
Are you sure you got dropped from Sphinn because you asked for votes? Here’s Danny Sullivan (founder and owner of Sphinn) asking for Sphinns on his own post last week http://twitter.com/dannysullivan/status/972707609.
Check out john andrews’s last blog post..Google’s Brand Arrogance & Typo Domains Revisited
That’s true. Me myself also started blogging in blogger.com and I have no idea about this WordPress
Maybe WordPress should start working on this. They must try to buy sponsored links in google search to promote themselves.
Check out Hussein’s last blog post..WordPress Theme Weekly: Mahinahon
They actually do have adwords campaigns in the serps! I couldn’t believe that!
Hi John,
Really I don’t know. I sent in a message thru the contact form. Regretfully I was really upset and as always blew things up bigger than I should have… regardless though, the story has been removed and I don’t know why?
For me, I really just feel sad actually because I really like Sphinn.com. I think its a great place, has great people and its a great source for learning. Today I was happy to learn that I had a number of readers who never heard of it and said that they would be signing up for accounts.
So this was an emotional ride. I was very happy with knowing that I was sending quite a few of my readers over there, and then suddenly my story got pulled. Stuff like that kinda messes with me.
We’ll see what happens in a day or so I guess. Thanks for the comment, it does help.
Really? I haven’t seen it yet. Hey. Even in Yahoo! Wordpress is not in the top 10 in the keyword “blog” and “create a blog” HAHA Funny.
Check out Hussein’s last blog post..WordPress Theme Weekly: Mahinahon
Feedburner seems to reset when one of them gets up near a hundred. But it resets all of them to zero.
On a couple of my genealogy sites where I have over a thousand Feedblitz email subscribers, my RSS subscribers is still always less than 100.
Somethings wrong.
Rich
Check out Rich Hill’s last blog post..New Contest Online Register for Free Prizes
now i know about 0.1% why i dont have visitor ,or traffic to my blog lol
Check out ibu’s last blog post..Blair Underwood’s Aha! Moment
oh i see why i do not get so much traffic,
also how do i add ads to my blog any help, u seem to be the PRO
Looks like people can VOTE again. It seems that Sphinn thought that I was a spammer and was falsely voting on the story I submitted. As for my original account, guilty as charged, however, in all fairness, I really didn’t know what I was doing. The problem was that I submitted a story into Propeller and then I used propeller story URL when submitting into Sphinn.com.
I think that it is great that my story is back on Sphinn.com. I just checked a few minutes ago, and the story even went “HOT”. There is one thing that bothers me after this whole mess comes to an end:
These “New Accounts” are “My Readers” whom I referred over to Sphinn.com. How about a thank you, Rob Kerry for sending you new people to the Sphinn.com community? Or, would that be too difficult for you?
Anyway, I am glad to see that my story is back live and even more pleased to see that it made the front page of Sphinn.com as that my aim for yesterday.
Really? Wordpress comes up #5 for me. Also among them the mandatory wikipedia entry, Googles blogger.com and blog search and yahoo’s 360. Really the only one that deserves to be there is the wikipedia entry since some one searching for the word blog is probably trying to find some information on what a blog is.
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Well call me a troublemaker, but courtesy is not one of the Evil Green Monkey’s strong points. You usually have to push past him to Danny Sullivan if you need that.
Congrats Gary on appearing legitimate! Woohoo, enjoy the external validation (sarcasm).
Oh, and on behalf of the rest of the Sphinn community that does not have any financial interest in its operations, thanks for trying so hard to participate!
-=john andrews
Just to point out Typepad is in the top results
“And as mentioned, there is no listing for WordPress.com, WordPress.org or even something remotely alternative such as TypePad.”
Sethgodin.typepad.com is in the list this relates too.
I run 80% of my blogs in typepad and they rank better than my blogger ones. I have not used wordpress before but I think that Blogger and wordpress are better for ranking as they are more manageable.
Did you try your research on other search engines like yahoo , msn etc. If they are ranking wordpress higher, then Google is being partial to blogger. Thus google become unfair by being biased and is trying to mislead the users from better or more accurate information
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Thanks for the article, it really helped me.
Here’s an alternate thought — perhaps blogger and blogspot come up higher because the word blog is a part of their name.
Kind of like Toys R Us vs FAO Schwarz
I never thought of doing search like that. But I was sure of one thing that blogger or blogspot will be at top of the list as google owns it. Google is trying to create monopoly by making free easy softwares. And in return they display results the way they want. That is the reason I am trying to quit google software. I just tried chrome and dumped it.
[...] Does Google Hate WordPress and Other Blog Platforms? [...]
soooo, it would appear now that wordpress has made page 1. Albeit #8 ranking for me.
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