Podshow as a Blogging Platform: Cursory SEO Review
A friend of mine was considering starting a blog and was in the market for a blogging platform. He has a fairly popular podcast and and is affiliated Podshow Inc. so one of the obvious options was to use the new blogging platform which is provided as Podshow’’s Podshow PLUS platform.
Since we do work with optimizing the websites we create here at HedgeCo Hedge Fund Website Creation, he asked me to take a look at the blogging platform and see how it would preform against a platform like Blogger or a stand-alone application like Wordpress (which is the blogging engine that we use here at the HedgeCo Websites blog).For this review, we will use Molly Hamacher, a character from Shadow Falls who has a fairly active blog as an example. I will mention “Google” a lot, this is only because this is the most popular search engine, my recommendations apply to all search engines however it is commonly accepted that if you optimizes for “Google” then the optimisations apply to other search engines as well.
1. Platform Overview & Internal Linking When a user signs up with Podshow they get their “front page” the URL is a sub-domain of podshow.com. In Molly’’s case this is http://mollysdiary.podshow.com/ this page contains “modules” which the user can selectively add to their page. One of the modules, is the “blog” which contains a list with the titles of the most recent blog entries. These modules are loaded using a Javascript “AJAX” call. Google does not parse javascript, and therefore, google sees no links exist between the podshow home page and the individual blog entries. This is proven by the google cache of this page. The front page has html links (which Google recognises) to “blog posts” and “entourage”. The link to “blog posts” directs you to a page that lists the blog entries by the current user. The Entourage page contains links to other user’’s home pages. The purpose in using a social networking platform to boost your search engine rankings is to use the power of the interlinking system between users to direct search engines to the individual blog pages which contain the relevant information. The image below illustrates the path which a search engine will have to take to get from one users front page to another users blog entry.
Because of the lack of a good html link based navigation system there are too many “hops” between one user’’s home page to another users blog entry to make this useful for search engines.
2. Blog Index Overview The lack of a good internal linking strategy negates some of the benefits to choosing a social networking platform, like podshow, to host your blog. However, if you choose to use wordpress and host your own blog, you will not have any social networking bonus, so this is not a show-stopper. We will now look at the format of the blog page. Molly Hamacher’’s blog is here. One of the most important parts of a blog entry is the title. The title generally contains key words regarding the content of the blog entry, and if you want to help search engines pick up your blog, you will want to choose a keyword intensive title and then make sure that the title text is the text being used as the anchor text used to link the blog index page with the blog entry itself. This helps google to associate the keyword rich title with the specific blog entry. The Podshow blog platform does not do this, but instead only provides one link to the individual blog entry, this link has the anchor text of “Comments” which gives no semantic definition of the link to google. Podshow does provide an alternate calendar based navigation, but due to the fact that it is based on javascript, does not provide any useful information to google. Podshow does not provide any way to link to other blogs which would benefit search engine rankings. 3. Blog Page Overview When you click on the “comments” link you can view the page dedicated to the specific blog entry. This is the most important page as it is the landing page which you want google to direct users to when they search for a relevant term. The more individual blog entries you have, the more pages google will index, and in turn the more people will come to your blog. The html syntax that Podshow implements leaves a lot to be desired. Because we discussed the importance of the title above, it is important that the title is included in a header html tag. This tells google that the title text is important, and google will treat this as additional metadata when indexing the page. While Podshow does add this information into the title of the page, there is no coherent structure when it comes to the blog entries. Search engine friendly URL’’s are also an important part of giving Google extra metadata to work with. A URL structure would be something like: http://mollysdiary.podshow.com/blog/1275/ or better yet: http://mollysdiary.podshow.com/blog/dec-25/ (using the title to add meta-data) instead it is: http://www.podshow.com/blog/detail.php?persona=mollysdiary&postId=1275 This adds very little information for google, and in fact if you search for text specific to this post, only the index is displayed making this page all but invisible to google. Podshow Plus does not provide any trackback method or any way to automatically ping blog aggregtors, it also does not provide a categorisation or tagging system which aggregators like technorati can take advantage of. 4. Recommendations As a social networking tool Podshow plus makes a great place to post your podcasts and create blog entries, the community is active and you can target the highly specialized audience of Podshow Plus users. However, when marketing a product to a larger audience the cumbersomeness of the Javascript interface does not make the platform suitable for search engine marketing. Using social networking skills and creating interesting content will give you a large entourage within Podshow, but all those links will not provide additional leverage for the site and will therefore not translate into additional coverage by google. By taking a few steps to make the blog system in Podshow Plus more accessible to search engines, Podshow will expand it’’s presence in search engines and be able to create a platform which will not just be attractive to the current users of Podshow plus but will attract visitors through search engines who are outside the current demographic which is being targetted. For more information, or a detailed technical review please contact the HedgeCo Websites support team.
