I've heard that blogs may be the wave of the future. My guess is that content may be more important, whether website or blog. The theory I hear is that blogs are supposed to change and be current, but websites can change too. Opinions about blogs and rankings? Also, would Google recognize a blog via software, or by the text "blog" in tags and text? Opinion again? Thanks.
I don't know if Google cares about whether or not a site is a blog or has a blog. My guess is that the format would be much the same, being that it shows the date of a post and usually lists the most recent post at the top and descends from there. Blogs are definitely a good way to go. Blogs would be close to a news site in format with constantly updated content. An advantage of blogs is that they usually have almost all original content, whereas many news sites will have a mix of AP articles (which may be displayed on other sites), along with original articles. News sites have some other advantages over blogs, such as more readership and backlinks, a large staff of writers, etc.
i think "blog" txt is one of the criterias but i'm sure that google has more than one criterias for recognition the types of the sites.
I think that what Google wants is fresh unique content updated constantly. Blogs just happens to be one of the easiest and most practical ways to make this happen.
One thing I just tried tonight, was to rename one page with the word "Blog". Put "blog" in the tags and in the text. It really is the closest page I have to a blog, and basically is. Now that I think about it, its just one more keyword that can be found on a page if that's what someone is searching for.
The blogsphere is getting saturated each passing day. I believe the hype about blogs is going to die down as every idiot now can open a blog.
There's really not a lot of professional material out there about optimizing a blog page, is there Sort of a free for all.