First report I've heard of that particular bug. Does your site use a CMS?

google also considers one of my sites a blog and it isnt. I do allow commenting on each page...if you allow commenting and show the date/times of the comment..that may be why google considers it a blog. Or look for other similarities your site might have with a blog

We do have a blog but it's on a different sub domain. The page that ranks is an internal page on the root.

There are no similarities with my main site and a blog. The site doesn't allow comments, they aren't time-stamped, no tags / categories etc.

It's a bit bizarre.

I've seen Google identify anything with an RSS feed attached to it as a blog. Even when the page itself doesn't have an RSS feed on it, if it's a click away from the main page, Google will think it's the blog for the base domain of the site.

For example, blog.example.com hosts a blog which has an RSS feed on it, and is accessible by clicking on the Blog link on www.example.com. Sometimes Google will list www.example.com as the blog URL instead of the URL it's actually hosted on. This is especially true if your RSS code identifies www.example.com in the "link" tag of the channel, or even the items.

If you don't have anything that even resembles a feed, I don't know what the answer would be.

I've seen Google identify anything with an RSS feed attached to it as a blog.

I just checked and my site (again, definitely not a blog) has two feeds - one for the main site and one for the blog. I managed to find a page from the main site (i.e. example.com/mypage) on Google blog search, but the green url at the bottom pointed to the actual blog (i.e. example.com/blog), but the title in it was that of the feed for the main site.

Google is evidently confused.

I wonder whether I should have an RSS feed for this site. If it confuses Google about the nature of the site, it might be harmful.

Has anyone tried blocking the google blog pinging service in the robots.txt file?
According to [webmasterworld.com...] the UserAgent is:
"Feedfetcher-google; (+http://www.google.com/feedfetcher.html)"

Seems very risky.

I've seen Google identify anything with an RSS feed attached to it as a blog.

I concur. My custom website, which isn't exactly a blog but has some similar features, is also listed under Google Blog Search. My first thought was that it could only be due to the RSS feed.

SHHHHHHH! I use this RSS feed looking like a blog trick! don't tell anyone or they might fix it!

[edited by: incrediBILL at 7:19 am (utc) on July 9, 2009]

SHHHHHHH! I use this RSS feed looking like a blog trick! don't tell anyone or they might fix it!

Bill - Are you not sacrificing your rankings on the main results, just to appear on Google’s blog results?

Being seen as a blog, in my opinion is doubly beneficial - you now get results of blogsearch in addition to the SERPS.

Every website should strive to look like a blog! ;)

It is definitely the feed that is doing it. The site I mentioned does not look like a blog at all: it is not chronologically ordered, it does not allow comments, or send of accept trackbacks/pingbacks, it has no dated archives (or show article dates at all), and it has a blog on the example.com/blog url.....

Being seen as a blog might be a plus for blogsearch traffic but what if Adwords advertisers uncheck blog sites for their campaign? You might be losing out on it.

I also have a few sites with RSS feeds, they're hand coded and they're not blogs, although people can comment on some of the content, I like the extra traffic, but it worries me a bit.

Anyway what's the definition of a blog? Using one of the major platform such as Wordpress? Writing about your cats?

I just exposed our on site job listings via RSS and it shows as the top related blog searching for our brand and some of the job listings show up in the blog search.

And our news & event listings that I also recently made available via RSS are also showing up.

We do use a CMS - Drupal.

A definition of a blog? I would have thought that content ordered in reverse chronological order is a prerequisite, and that is something Google is not checking.

Of course it is not enough: news sites use reverse chronological order, and many allow comments. I would say a blog also needs to be someone's personal voice - i.e. opinion based with a single author, strongly controlled by a single editor.

The definition of what is a blog and what is a website is now no longer clear cut.

One of my sites is classified as both an authority on my primary topic in Google's blog search and ranked highly accross the board in regular search.

The important distinction is not blog vs website but good content vs poor content regardless of site architecture. I have also observed trends that suggest websites can benefit by providing rss feeds to key services.

HOWEVER, if your CMS has an active comments section I STRONGLY recommend you make visitors register and show comments only to logged in visitors. There is good reason that Google blog search returns blogs with protected comment sections (or no comment sections at all) so highly.

Better yet, add a traditional forum to your blog and consolidate user generated content while keeping your articles clean.