In case you didn’t know, Google has it’s own blog search engine called Google Blogsearch. Many people use the regular search engine, but their blog search has interesting tools that are more helpful than the regular search engine. Although it’s called blog search, in actuality, Google’s blogsearch will rank anything attached to it with a RSS feed, including forums and news sites.

Google Blogsearch is a seperate entity from the regular search engine, with it’s own algorithms. You can find the google patent application for Google Blogsearch Here. The patent gives a lot of insight into how Google will rank blogs in it’s Blog Search.

Major Ranking Factors in Google BlogSearch:

1) Google’s regular ranking factors: Although there is many algorithm differences between the regular search engine and Blogsearch, there is going to be many of the same factors at play too. Pagerank, SEO optimization, good content writing, duplicate content, link age, anchor text, ageing, and other issues will still be a major factor in how blog posts are ranked in Google Blogsearch.

2) Feed Readership: Reading the patent application you can see a special importance of blogs based on how many feed subscribers they have. One may wonder how the heck can Google find out that kind of information? Well recently Google bought out feedburner, the largest Feed network. There is no doubt that Google will be using this information for ranking in it’s blog search. Google probably uses also the information from it’s Google Reader, which has about 30% of the market share. So it would be a good idea to sign up for feedburner and make your feed icons very visible.

3) Frequency of Clicks: Another tidbit from the Patent application discusses how blog posts that are clicked on frequently in the search, are ranked better. It has long been known that Google increases rankings to sites that get more clicks in their SERPs and by how long the visitor stays at the site. To help increase the chance of someone clicking, making a good title and a search engine snippet (description in the search engine results) are important. You can find plugins or code, to sharpen your snippets as often they are pretty “dirty” looking.

4) Blogrolls: Google Patent in length talks about the importance of blogroll links from other blogs. I’m not sure how positive reciprocal blogroll links are seen in Googles regular search engine, but it seems to be seen highly in Google Blogsearch.

5) Social Bookmarking: Google Patent talks about blogs that tag their content. Google sees it as important indicator of quality because it appropriately declares what the post is about. Social Bookmarking are “online bookmarking networks” such as Technorati,Stumbleupon, del.icio.us, Digg. Google Blogsearch probably factors in how many times your site has been bookmarked online and what tags were used. To understand how to effectively use tagging with Social Bookmarking you must understand SMO(Social Media Optimization).

6) Other factors: There is many other minor factors that are beyond the scope of this article. One interesting one, is that Google will actually read Gmail or Google Talk, to see how often people click on links to your blog. This is really fascinating to me and shows the level Google will go to to make it’s search engine better. I’ve always though Google was a smart search engine, not to be understimated.