For quite some time there have been rumours that Google, and probably other search engines as well, are going to move blogs from their main search results, and move them to their own category.
For some blogs this makes sense. Blogs that are just copying news found on other blogs, sometimes not even bothering to add something, but cluttering up the search result pages (SERPs).
However, there are blogs with good content, blogs that have, in my not so humble opinion, the same right to be in the search results as any other page, maybe even more so, compared to other sites that make a mess of the search results: lyric sites, sites that archive postings on Usenet, sites that clone Wikipedia content or other free content.
This month Google Blog Search was made available for public testing. The question is: does this mean that blogs are going to removed from the main search index? I think not, since if a site has an RSS feed, and you ping it, it is added to Google Blog Search. Quite fast even.
This would mean that if a competitor has a site, and RSS web feed, it can be blog pinged, and moved out of the main search index, into Google blog search. Of course inclusion can be prevented by editing robots.txt and prevent Google from spidering your feed:
If you do not publish a site feed for your blog, it will not be included in Blog Search. However, if you previously published a site feed that was included, the old posts will remain in the index, even though new ones are not added.
But if I am wrong, this could be the end of RSS web feeds, since I doubt if that many people want to be removed from the main search index.
By using services like Ping-o-Matic, you can have your blog added to Google Blog Search if you also have an RSS web feed. I accidentally pinged different URLs on my site, and noticed that with an inurl: search all show up:
