It seems that new blogs I start always get a great initial placement on topical searches. Often, they will fall from their ranks after the first couple of weeks, then I go out and build up some back links & add fresh content and they start getting ranked again. Do you think this phenomena is unique to blog sites? Or do you think it exists for any site that is new or has fresh content being added to it? Discuss.
Most new sites tend to get a touch of preferential treament by search engines. As for blogs, SEs love them because they update so frequently...
Blogs have no preferential treatment over other types of Web sites with the search enignes. If you were to put a blog next a regular site and update them at the same time with the same type of content, they would likely do equally as well. Remember, all search engine spiders see is text - not what makes it.
I have also noticed this with new blogs, as opposed to new forums or other bespoke sites. There does appear to be something in it, however it is very difficult to determine empirically. I recall reading that forums are treated a little differently based on common indicators in forum urls (such as "showthread.php" or "viewtopic.php" etc.)
I would think the same would apply to blogs, seeing things like Trackbacks, meta data that gets embedded into the source of the blog pages, or maybe even the existence of a XMLRPC.php.
It's not so much a preference for blogs per se but for QUALITIES that blogs have--episodic and updated content, urls that have keywords (tweaks), etc. It's these qualities that are driving content niches from casinos to adult to the blog format for the past several years now.
Also not to be underestimated is the general tendency for bloggers to be very active at creating links. Its great knowing blogs & forums that offer commenting without adding no-follow too. It seems that niche doesn't really matter so much either except in "extreme circumstances" though it does make things look more natural, bad neighborhoods notwithstanding.
Search engines love content, not the blogs preferencially. Blogs are frequently updated and search engines like to index that
As others have said, search engines love frequently updated sites. A blog is pretty much the definition of a frequently updated site.
Others already said this, but the main focus is the content and how often you update that content. I wouldn't say blogs have a special treatment but if you think about it, blogging platforms have a simple switch you can turn off and on to have the search engine crawlers crawl your site compared with other sites that don't have that.