Dumb SEO Questions

(Entry was posted by Scott Cohe on this post in the Dumb SEO Questions community on Facebook, 09/19/2013).

Will word "blog" in the navigation make Google index the site better?

I have a question. The company I just started working for is designing a site for a client. They have a blog on the site, called "What You Don`t Know". I told them that I think they should use the word "blog" in the navigation so Google can index the site better and it will help for SEO. They don`t want the word blog on the page, but will if it helps for SEO. Any idea, or even better, links to articles I can show my boss regarding using the term "blog"?
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YOUR ANSWERS

Selected answers from the Dumb SEO Questions Facebook & G+ community.

  • Simon Fryer: I wouldn't really worry about what you call the area of the site. Calling it 'blog' or 'news' for example won't really make a difference; it's the content within it that's important. Use something that's fits in the navigation nicely and is easy to understand.
  • David Kutcher: I'm confused: what does "blog" have to do with SEO? why do they need to have the word "blog" in their blog name? It's just a page title. Put it into the title text or the page title of the landing page for the blog.
  • Scott Cohen: I didn't know if google looked specifically for the word "blog". They didn't want the word on the page at all and i was wondering if that was a mistake. Seems like its not though
  • Joe Rega: Search engines aren't looking for the works "blog" per se, they're crawling your site looking for how often pages are updated & how often new content is added. A blog , regardless of what it's called, will provide search engines with new content to crawl and index.
  • Greg Baka: Until reading these comments, I was pretty sure that +Scott Cohen was correct in declaring that area of the site as a "blog" by linking to it that way (and probably also using schema and Open Graph tags to declare it a blog).

    Is it no longer true that Google strives for a mix of results on the first page and that blog pages, images, videos, news articles, and standard webpages are all part of that mix?

    If yes, having a blog-like chunk of the website defined as a blog seems wise.

    Or is there some other better way to tell Google that "This is a blog"?
  • Simon Fryer: +Greg Baka to explain it in a more abstract way, there is no such thing as a blog. The term 'blog' simply describes a content delivery channel which is regularly updated. You could call it your OMGWTF area, and it would still be identified as your content delivery channel, provided you're updating it regularly. Using the right markup and RSS feeds, for example, helps search engines identify it.
  • Patrick Berzai: The word itself does not matter.

    As an aside, I love to rebrand the word "blog." Not sure what word I'd use but no matter how blogs have become a part of the web (even for corporations) I still imagine bloggers as geeks in their parents basement who can't get a date. 
  • Dave Elliott: This actually leads into a questio. I wanted answered. While there is no seo value does anyone have any onsite ctr stats comparing 'news' 'blog' 'opinions' and things like that? Basically are users more likely to click on a blog than a news section On a b2c site?

View original question in the Dumb SEO Questions community on Facebook, 09/19/2013).