Official Google Blog review

Their mission… “Insights from Googlers about our products, technology, and the Google culture.”    The site is extremely simple with its blog content down the middle, search features on the right side of the page, and lots of annoying white space.  That’s it.  It’s actually very boring.  Everyone knows that when it comes to blogging, Google rules with its Google Ads.  Everyone wants to get a higher page rank and show up at the top of Google search results.  Google (the largest search engine on the internet) you would think their blog would be easy to find, but there is no direct link on their home page.  I had to actually google it to find it.  Google actually has hundreds of different blogs.  You can visit the directory to see all the different topics.  I did take a look at some of the other blogs and most have the same boring layout, but a couple did have some images.  The Official Google Webmaster Central Blog, which is the official news on crawling and indexing sites for the Google index is a good resource to help move your site/blog up on their index.

From a social media standpoint they do allow you to share the posts through the social media of your choice (Email, Blogger, Twitter, Facebook, Google Buzz, or Google+1) although they have conveniently grayed out anything that isn’t a Google product.  They also do a good job of posting often.  They seem to post once a day and sometimes several times per day.  There seems to be several different authors who write for the blog and most of the posts seemed to be written well and without errors.   Although, they probably could spice it up in the content area.  Its posts definitely fall under its very broad mission statement but I think they could benefit more by having a more focused approach.  They do provide notes at the bottom of posts whenever changes are made, which lets us know they are being honest.

The major piece missing was that they do not provide an opportunity for readers to leave comments.  Consumer input is a huge part of what makes a corporate blog successful.  I think this is where they get a FAIL, especially when they are pioneers in the industry.  If you don’t allow comments, how can you address your reader’s concerns about specific issues?  Companies that blog successfully understand that being transparent and approachable are the best tools to strengthen public image.  Take Starbucks for example.  Their entire blog is a global brainstorming platform. Customers submit new ideas for food, drinks, and even store designs then the Starbucks team will blog about the ideas and build on them through customer comments.  That’s pure genius.  On the other hand, Google is doing a poor job of engaging and growing their audience.  I believe that when people realize they cannot leave their opinion they won’t come back. Google has by far created some amazing apps and products, but their blog left me feeling that the only reason they have the blog is to push their product information and updates.  I believe Google is a poor example of corporate blogging.