Take a moment to read this excellent article on why weblogs disproportionately influence Google search results. The argument, in a nutshell:

1. Google likes pages with lots of links, as well as pages that are frequently linked to by other pages. Weblogs are full of links, and are highly interlinked with each other.

2. Google likes fresh content. Weblogs are updated daily or more.

Taken together, the factors explain why weblogs have an unusually high level of influence on Google rankings. Case in point: as of today, the post I wrote last Friday on urinal etiquette is now Google’s number two result for the search term ‘urinal etiquette‘ and makes the first page for the search term ‘urinal.’ (Perhaps not the area of expertise with which I’d most want to be associated, but I take what I can get.)

The interesting point, though, is that the high ranking of my urinal page wasn’t primarily caused by the page itself. Rather, it was caused by the webloggers who linked the page from their own sites. Although the majority of searchers arriving at the urinal page might never visit any of the weblogs that linked the page, the linking webloggers nonetheless shaped and directed the searchers’ experiences.

More broadly, while many web users may never visit even a single weblog, the collective voting power of those weblogs very heavily influences how the web is experienced by the people who pass through Google more than a billion times a week.

So who’s wasting their time now, mom?