Google doesn’t distinguish between blog posts and webpages when indexing and ranking content. A “post” can rank just as well as a “page.”
This is stated by Google’s John Mueller during his weekly SEO hangout recorded on June 4.
A site owner named Navin Adhikari joins the stream to ask Mueller why his blog posts aren’t getting as much traffic as his services pages.
He asks if Google treats content differently when it’s published in the blog section of website compared to content published in other sections.
Mueller says the difference in traffic likely has nothing to do with where the content is published, and more to do with internal linking.
Here’s Mueller’s full response.
Google’s John Mueller On Ranking Posts vs Pages
Whether content is considered a “post” or a “page” is an identifier in the backend of a website’s CMS. It helps site owners keep content organized, but it’s not something Google would be able to recognize.
“I don’t think Googlebot would recognize that there’s a difference. So usually that difference between posts and pages is something that is more within your backend within the CMS that you’re using, within WordPress in that case. And it wouldn’t be something that would be visible to us.
So we would look at these as if it’s an HTML page and there’s lots of content here and it’s linked within your website in this way, and based on that we would rank this HTML page.
We would not say oh it’s a blog post, or it’s a page, or it’s an informational article. We would essentially say it’s an HTML page and there’s this content here and it’s interlinked within your website in this specific way.”
Adhikari follows up with another question about whether using longer URLs for blog posts might be causing problems.
Mueller says no, that shouldn’t be a problem. What’s likely the problem is how those blog posts are linked to from other pages on the site.
If there are more internal links pointing to services pages than blog posts, then Google will see the services pages as more important.
When blog posts are not linked to from other pages on a site then Google can’t accurately assess their level of importance, which creates challenges for search rankings.
“I think, I mean, I don’t know your website so it’s hard to say. But what might be happening is that the internal linking of your website is different for the blog section as for the services section or the other parts of your website.
And if the internal linking is very different then it’s possible that we would not be able to understand that this is an important part of the website.
It’s not tied to the URLs, it’s not tied to the type of page. It’s really like we don’t understand how important this part of the website is.”
With that in mind, if your blog posts are not getting as much as you’d like them to, add more internal links.
Linking to recent blog posts from the home page of a website would send a strong signal to Google that the content is important.
It can also help to add contextual links to relevant blog posts from services pages or other high ranking pieces of content.
Hear the full discussion in the video below:
