Roes are red
Violets are blue
Google’s creative
on Valentines too…

 
I realized I was an “Internet junkie” when I found myself logging onto Google’s homepage this morning just to see the new Valentine’s Day logo! For those of you who use the Internet on a regular basis, you’ve probably noticed how Google changes its logo for major holidays and big events. I find this oddly amusing, and thought I’d share some fun facts I learned.
 The Google holiday logos, also known as “Google Doodles” are created by Dennis Hwang. Hwang “designed his first logo for Google in honor of Bastille Day (a national French holiday), July 14, 2000, and has been designing the specialty logos ever since.”  To view some of his previous work, check out the Google logo museum. I’ll be looking forward to the St. Patty’s Day logo!

I searched for the answer to this question at Google.  How often should I blog?, blog frequency, blogging schedule and similar queries returned amazingly relevant results from bloggers ranging from writers to affiliates to realtors to lifehackers. Here’s a very unscientific summary of their advice.

The best overall suggestion I found was if you don’t have anything to say, don’t say anything. Quite a few bloggers talked about nuisance blog posts clogging the web and the bad noise drowning out the good.  Frequency of blog posts should be dictated by the quality of what you have to say.  If you’ve created a blog for the right reason(s), then you are passionate about your topic and should have plenty of useful information to share.

Many bloggers also agree that blogging frequency is dictated by the type of blog you have. News blogs, of course, would be at the most frequent end of the scale. Thoughtful and thought-provoking essays are somewhere near the other end.

Most of our bloggers think that no matter what your posting schedule is, you should be consistent with it, so that your readers get into the habit of visiting regularly.

You’ve probably guessed by now that there is no one answer on posting frequency that applies to every blog or every blogger. For most of us, the right answer is from once a day to once a week, with most of our advisors recommending posting 2 to 3 times per week.

A friend turned me on to research by Nancy McCord, of McCord Web Design, that shows that website traffic increases with the addition of a blog. A blog also increases the stickiness of  a website and can improve its organic rankings in Google. In contrast, McCord also found that when blogging stops, the opposite occurs and traffic and page views drop.

Because of the small sample size, the study gives us clues and the impetus to look at our own results and see what they tell us.

Download Nancy McCord’s free white paper The Tangible Benefits of Blogging to learn more about why you need a blog.

The explosion of blogs is phenomenal. Millions of people who had no idea what a blog was 2 years ago, now have one. Is it a fad? Well, yes and no.

Good Blogs

Blogs with a clear cut purpose to which the owner is committed are proving to be incredible online business tools. They are used successfully for leads, sales, sign-ups, reputation management, media and customer relations, traffic building and strengthening the SEO of websites with which they are associated.

Bad Blogs

However, for those with short attention spans and not much to say, the thrill is quickly over. These blogs do not get posted to regularly. Therefore, the Search Engines visit them less and less often, they never attain decent rankings and they don’t attract much, if any, traffic. These blogs languish unattended and unnoticed on the web.

Abandoned Blogs and Google

These abandoned blogs give the visitor a bad search experience. Therefore, Google User Experience Researchers are working on ways to identify them.

Why do we care? So that we can make certain our blogs do not take on the characteristics of abandoned blogs. And why is that important? Because if Google is studying it, then we can expect it to enter into their algorithm at some point. When it does, I expect that those blogs identified as abandoned with be either filtered completely out of the index or be pushed so far down in the rankings as to become invisible on the web.

What are the Characteristics of Abandoned Blogs?

They never became established, so they are considered fad or spam blogs. This includes blogs that:

• Have a very short lifepan. Google thinks this is less than 9 days – a week and a weekend – of active involvement by the writer, once the blog goes up. Owner interest lasted less than 9 days and after that, no more posts were made.
• Have very little content. Google currently measures this as less than 11 total posts.

They are inactive, which Google is finding somewhat more difficult to define. At first, they seemed to have settled on 30 days of inactivity as a general metric of abandonment. However, they do not want to apply it to all bloggers, as some people who do not post often still post regularly.

The inference here is that most established blogs are posted to at least once every 30 days, but they will make exceptions for those who post on a less frequent schedule, as long as that schedule is somewhat regular.

What Should We Do About It?

Blog regularly and, if at all possible, post to your blog at least once every 30 days. This is the very least you should do, if you want your blog to remain viable from Google’s point of view.

In reality, you are not coming close to realizing your blog’s potential if you do not post to it at least once or twice a week. The more you post, the more frequently the Search Engine spiders and interested humans will return to see what you have added. So, blog on!