Next, I visit one of 6 sites listed as a resource in Anywhere, USA. I find local address, and it has same zip code as pizza site I was just at. Now I know how these two sites are related to each other.

Taking into account fact that this local pizza shop has also linked to major pizza chains, as spider, I am lead to believe that this shop has relevancy to zip code of Anywhere, USA.

So, as spider returns information to database to be processed in algorithm, it has pre-sorted some search results based on links your site points to.

Another benefit of outbound linking is Geo Targeting, or Local search. There is a lot of speculation that local search is next big trend in Search Marketing. While only time will tell, it won't hurt to have your physical address listed on your website for those who will be embracing local search.

As an experiment, I created a site with a very unique url (to avoid possibility of people finding it by accident), and I made it only 1 page long. The only thing page consisted of were 80+ outbound links to relevant sites in SEO industry, tools, forums and some tutorials. When PageRank was first updated for site, it came out of box with a PR of 3. It has since fallen to a PR of 2 (now that I’ve pointed a few sites to it!).

The whole point of this experiment was to see how outbound links affect your own rankings of your site. I was able to generate a PR of 2 based entirely on linking to authority sites in SEO industry. So, take time to link to some relevant sites, big names (if any), and enjoy power of easy, outbound link.

-To your online success!

Paul Bliss

And they’re not completely wrong – there is a parallel. But a parallel is not a cause. It’s just one facet of relationship between blogs and getting better results in Yahoo, Google and MSN.

Their frequency of updates had something to do with their rankings, yes. But it is not what guarantees they get spidered – and if blog isn’t set up to take advantage of visit from search engine spiders, they don’t get listed.

To begin to have an understanding of how to get similar results for your site, you have to look at bigger picture. Spam-pinging isn’t going to do it, and as I’ve said in other articles, there are other ethical, faster, simpler ways to do this.

So what is this bigger picture?

First of all, blogs have a natural tendency to rank higher in search engines because they

Have well-structured site architecture

Make use of anchor text linking

Are well linked,

Are frequently updated, and,

Are focused tightly around a narrow theme, among other things.

Couple this with ease of being able to get one-way links from several sites favored by search engines, and you have two-thirds of formula for a well-ranked blog.

However, just because these sites appear on publicly displayed ping notification lists and other sites that keep abreast of blog updates, this doesn’t mean that you can get away with pinging them without updating your site.

It also doesn’t mean that sites that have authentically updated and sent pings will appear in Google, Yahoo or MSN simply from being frequently updated.

The good news is, you don’t need to deluge ping sites to get noticed. Doing so is often a waste of time, and may be a harmful one.

Your best bet for now is to continue to achieve your natural search engine position through blogging, basic search engine optimization, and a common sense approach to frequent updates.

And yes, by way, there IS an ethical way to get into search engines and achieve high rankings with a blog, but it’s not a matter of volume. It’s more a matter of timing, supply and demand. But explaining that process takes a level of detail and an amount of space not available here.