Irishwonder’s Black Hat SEO Blog A blog about blackhat, general SEO issues and other things related to the life on the web

Google’s new blog search service still doesn’t have its own terms of use. The link on the Blog Search FAQ page points to Google’s general terms of use. They might have not added it yet as the service is very new as of today. What would be interesting to see is when they do publish one, will it mention anything about spam blogs/deindexing blogs and so on? Gotta know the rules to break them…

Looks like with the introduction of Google blog search, Blogger will lose its value as an aid for faster Google indexing. Google blog search FAQ says:

Your results include all blogs, not just those published through Blogger

and even

The goal of Blog Search is to include every blog that publishes a site feed (either RSS or Atom). It is not restricted to Blogger blogs, or blogs from any other service.

What Google also plans on is providing a submission form for people to submit blogs not yet indexed by their blog search service:

How do I get my blog listed?

If your blog publishes a site feed in any format and automatically pings an updating service (such as Weblogs.com), we should be able to find and list it. Also, we will soon be providing a form that you can use to manually add your blog to our index, in case we haven’t picked it up automatically. Stay tuned for more information on this.

It is still not clear whether it will go as far as providing an option to ping Google’s server when a blog is updated, and from the previous experience we’ve had with Google Sitemap, it is not quite clear if this service will be safe for blackhat blogs/sites.

As for the RSS feed Google provides for the search results in Blog Search, there is no explicit permission to use it for “commercial” purposes, but at the same time there is no explicit statement saying commercial use of the feed is prohibited. The FAQ only mentions using it with an aggregator:

Can I subscribe to search results?

Yes. At the bottom of each page of search results you can find several links, offering the top 10 or 100 results as either Atom or RSS feeds. Just grab the links from here and subscribe to them in the news aggregator of your choice and you will get updates whenever new posts are made that match your query.

Is it going to be a new backdoor for getting indexed by Google? Time will tell how effective the new service will turn for speeding up the indexing, but it definitely is an interesting new subject for further research and experimenting for the SEOs, white hat and black hat alike.