Is blogging dead?

Is blogging "5 minutes ago"?

The boom of social networking sites such as Facebook, Twitter, Flickr and more has some pundits saying that these are the new platforms of choice for user generated content and that the days of blogging are dead. We're here to tell you that this makes no sense, and here's why. Social networking content is not structured to be indexed effectively by search engines. Blogging and social networking platforms can co-exist, and you can use your social networks to bring more traffic to your blogs...

Are individual bloggers at the mercy of corporate bloggers?

Social networking die hards suggest that corporate-style blogs with a massive staff of content writers and large marketing budgets are drowning out the voices of small, independent bloggers. Cranking out dozens of posts a day, critics complain that it's now too difficult for individual bloggers to get indexed in the major search engines. What the critics fail to address in their rants is search marketing - the driving force behind search engine positioning. They also fail to recognize the search "unfriendliness" of most prominent social networking sites. Let me explain.

Why blogs are more search engine friendly than social networks

While a social networking site may be search engine friendly as a whole, the individual content pages (a "user's" page) are usually indexed as a whole, not in parts. This is the equivalent of having only the front page of your blog indexed. Take twitter, for example.

Twitter - a stream of thoughts

Twitter takes the idea of "fresh content" to a new level. Basically, on Twitter you post a stream of quick thoughts (max 140 characters) or updates on what you're doing. These updates are collected on one page, and when the page fills up it's archived. Your Twitter page may be twitter.com/example (substitute "example" with your username). This page is indexed in Google, but the page's sole identity is that of it's user, or fan page, or whatever purpose the Twitter page was created for. It is not an organized hierarchy of content that can be used to index multiple pages in Google and attract a high volume of search traffic.  The same goes for Facebook.

Facebook - a gathering of friends, or fans

The most highly ranked Facebook pages are those of celebrities or prominent industry figures. These pages deviate from the average Facebook page in that they are basically a sales page for that celebrities' or entities' products. So much for helping the little guy fly up the search results. Even if you are getting lots of traffic to your Facebook page, it's not from the search engines, but rather, from your network of friends. This isn't a bad thing, in fact, Facebook can be a great venue for yourself or your business to not only interact and keep up to date with friends and what they're up to, but to share and market your business ideas, services, and products. In our view, the purpose and function of social networks differs drastically from blogs. Enough so that they can, and should, peacefully coexist.

Why blogs and social networks should coexist

Google, a company that has one of the largest market capitalizations, revenue streams, and projected growth rates in the technology sector, has stated that its mission is to organize the world's information and make it accessible to the seekers of that information. So far it has been very successful, as over half of all projected searches on the Internet are conducted via Google. It has also capitalized on this access to information by monetizing searches for products and services via its advertiser and publisher networks, Google Adwords and Google Adsense.

Blog content is indexed, social network content is not

The advantage blogs have over social networks is that content postings can be readily indexed in the major search engines. For the most part, once content is indexed, it remains indexed unless you remove the page. With social networks, as described above with Twitter and Facebook, only your main page is indexed, because each user gets one main page, and that is where you post all your stuff. Note that in Twitter older content is archived in multiple pages (ie. twitter.com/example?page=2), but as we learned in our article on SEO 101, this approach is not search engine friendly, and the odds of these additional pages attracting meaningful search traffic is slim. Furthermore, the page you get on social networking sites simply reflects your identity, not a series of keyphrases you use to have content indexed and to attract search volume.

With social networks, you lose ownership and control of your content

Another major issue with social networks is that you lose control over your content. What happens if Facebook or Twitter loses your data? Or they go under or get bought out when the next new thing takes over and the social networking sites of today become a thing of the past? There go all your postings. And since they weren't indexed in the search engines there's no copy of them anywhere. Even if you back things up locally, others won't have access to your content anymore. With blog pages this is different - once your pages are indexed in a major search engine they tend to stay indexed permanently. Even if some get dropped in their index, if you blog regularly you are likely to have hundreds if not thousands of pages indexed. All these pages contribute to a steady stream of search traffic that makes your content accessible to the masses.

Social networks limit your publishing abilities by structuring content

With the exception of MySpace, which essentially lets you host a web page of your own design on their servers, most social networks impose limitations on the type of content you're allowed to post, and how you're allowed to post it. Twitter, for example, imposes a 140 character maximum on any one posting. Social networking pundits applaud this brevity. For what Twitter is made for, it's great - it keeps your postings to a minimum, allowing people to grasp the gist of your thoughts in seconds. But for the purpose of indexing and archiving your content and making it permanently accessible to those searching for the topic you're writing about, it is very ineffective. Search engines favor longer content - the more content you have on one page backing up your keyphrase (your page's identity), the better.

We want blogs and social networks, not one or the other

We're not meaning to de-emphasize the importance of social networks. They play an important role in any search marketing campaign. Read our article on effective link building to see how we use social networks to add to our presence on the web. We just want to make the point that blogs are far from dead. As long as people read and write, and the majority of information is discovered online via search engines that index pages, each with their own unique identity, blogs and any site that contains content that is appropriately structured will be indexed by search engines and discovered by people looking for your content.

Use social networks to feed your blogs

Blogs and social networks can not only coexist, they can support each other. Notice how we interlink the two. At the bottom of this page you'll notice links to various social networking sites. Social networking sites bring people together and make people aware of content that is published on your blog.