Conspiracy theory: Why wordpress.com blogs rank high in Google
Have you ever wondered why your wordpress.com blog ranks high in Google search results? You may have heard that WordPress has an excellent SEO, and that may be true, but I have my own theory: wordpress.com blogs rank high because when you land on a wordpress.com blog post from a search result, the blog will display Google Ads. This is something most blog owners on wordpress.com are blissfully unaware of.
Automattic needs to make money
In a previous post, I showed you how the ads look like when landing on my blog from a Google search result. Not just text ads, as Matt says, and not so contextual either. So why is WordPress displaying such ads on my blog in the first place? The main reason, of course, is that WordPress needs to make money. How else can they offer their blogging platform for free. As I said before, I don’t mind that…if only I had known beforehand, and if only I had known how the ads actually look like, and how they tend to mess up my carefully designed blog.
Google needs to make money, too
In an article on Plagiarism Today, Matt proudly claimed that wordpress.com is virtually spam-free, and as far as I can tell, that really is true, and until now I believed that to be the reason why wordpress.com blogs rank high in Google search results, but during my vacation a thought suddenly struck my mind: Could there be a collaboration here? If it is so that Google ads only display on wordpress.com blogs if you’re coming from a Google search, then a reason for the blogs to rank high in the search results is of course to actually make the ads show, simple as that. If Google knows that the ads will show if people click on the search results taking them to wordpress.com blogs, then of course Google has a very good reason to rank these blogs high in the search results, since people searching for certain keywords seldom go beyond the first or second page of search results: So by keeping wordpress.com blogs high up in the search results Google ensures that the ads will display and hence, make money for Google, simple as that.
A conspiracy?
True or not, these are just some thoughts that crossed my mind this week. Nonetheless, wordpress.com is a great tool for blogging, and as much as I hate the fact that these ads are there, I just as much love wordpress.com for its functionality. Besides, conspiracy or not, the fact still remains that wordpress.com blogs rank high in Google, and that’s something every wordpress.com blogger should be grateful for.
Related
Is there really no AdSense on wordpress.com?
Update
wordpress.com can now be ad-free
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Thanks for your comment on my blog. One thing I am particularly interested in as I see your blog are the “Share This” buttons you have at the bottom of each post.
How do you do that?
You can download the software to insert the buttons from here: Get Social. A tutorial on how to use the tool is here: TeckLine.
I’m confident that that’s not how Google works but I can appreciate the joy of speculating.
I think the ads might show at that time because Google can show more relevant ads based on the user’s search terms.
For sure, rankings are completely separate from whether there are Google ads or not. There is too much evidence to the contrary. Spammy Google ad sites don’t rank very high.
WordPress.com sites rank high for valid reasons, like good PageRank of the domain, clean optimized coding, and because search engines tend to love websites that are frequently updated.
I’ve been studying search engines for 10 years and regularly consult about optimization.