Google Blog Search has updated their ranking algorithm to reduce the number of results based on blogroll matches. This update should be especially useful for people who use blog search as part of their reputation management strategy.

A blogroll is a list of other blogs which the writer subscribes to or recommends. Previously, if your site was included in another sites blogroll, Google Blog Search would return a match for your site whenever the other site released a new post - simply because you were included in their blogroll.

This update should remove this problem and make tracking your brand a little easier. From the Google blog search team:

We have launched a ranking change that reduces the number of results that are returned because of blogroll matches. There are still problems to work out, but this change appears to be a big improvement over our earlier fix. We had originally planned to launch an experiment for link: queries, but decide more recently to release this change first. We are still working on the link: change and expect to have that ready in a few more weeks.

The problem originally started back in December 2008 when Google began indexing the full text of the page for each blog post. This meant that blogroll links were often included as part of a new blog post and users of Google Alerts started seeing much more frequent and often irrelevant updates.

I’m glad to see Google have fixed this issue which should make it easier to keep track of your brand across social media. Thanks to Search Engine Roundtable for picking this up.