Content is (Still) King: Reflections on the 2008 Weblog Awards

I mentioned in my most recent post that I just finished a stint as a judge for the 2008 Weblog Awards and enjoyed it immensely.

But there was more to it than that.

These weeks as a judge have brought home to me the sharp point that I spend too much time hanging out with the techie bloggers on the Internet. I follow the guys and gals who know all about product launch and widgets and coding and optimization. Several of them have a high Google Page Rank and Alexa scores. Some do not. But I read them all, almost daily.

However, I judged one of the political categories for the 2008 Weblog Awards, and oh my gosh – the page ranks. Every single conservative political blog had a page rank of – I kid you not – six or seven. Some of these blogs had clearly just been tossed up with Blogger and had never heard of SEO much less implemented it. It was amazing to see those page ranks and high traffic numbers come up over and over again. I looked at more than 150 conservative blogs. They all had tremendous traffic and page ranks. Far more so than the tech/how-to blogs.

For those of you going, “What’s the big deal? Who cares about page rank?”

Google Page Rank is to the blogosphere what the cafeteria is to high school. It’s the ultimate popularity contest, judged by a being more powerful than any single high school character. Maybe if you if combined the head cheerleader, the Student Council President, the captain of the football team, and the vice principal in charge of scholarships, academics, and course assignments – that would be The Google.

And The Google assigns your seat in the cafeteria through a complicated algorithm that ultimately decides how high you rank in search engine results, how much search traffic will organically come your way, and how trustworthy your site is viewed by bots the Internet over. And where you will go to college and who will be your date to the senior prom.

What did I learn from this humbling experience? That despite all the technical tweaking out there, despite all the tricks and tips of optimization and solid marketing copy, content is still king on the Internet. What you write is what sells.

And conservative content? It is extremely popular.

The food for thought question of the day is: does that also make it powerful??? Or is it just a better seat in the cafeteria.  Hmmm….

Tagged as: conservative political blogs, contests, Politics, search engine optimization, weblog awards