Well, there's another theory shot to hell.
Being a good little geek, i've taken to watch various search engines in order to figure out what extra "oomph" they look for. Like the rest of the planet, i've got some interest in making my personal project (and those associated with it) highly visible. Likewise anything i can do to raise the visibility of my work site, all the better.
There are a few strategies i've picked up that simply make sense. The number one being, that Google is trying to make the web a better place for browsers. To that end, clearly defined pages with easy to read links generally score higher than ones with buried text or deceptive elements (duh).
So's i gots to thinking about the fact that new pages tend to score higher google rankings than older ones. i've seen that time and time again. Oddly, frequently updated pages actually don't get improved google scores, from what i've been able to tell. For my test, i got some popular words and did some searches against them. The reasoning is that Blogs (which update DAMN frequently, should be pretty high on the list of returns, once you got past the official pages and those listed in DMOZ. Turns out, they're not. There are a bunch of static pages that don't seem to have that many links.
Looks like if Google is using blogs for relevancy, they're not really returning the favor.
There is one other thing that confused me a hair. i keep a page of search terms that i pull from my access logs every day. Not too surprisingly, some blog page of mine shows up pretty high on the return list for each of the terms searched.
One that consistently seemed to show up is my page about ginger altoids. For about a month, i was in the top four. i'd note that no-one linked to me for that information. Likewise, i'm now very high up in the list for popup blockers, actually beating some far more popular and higher ranked pages.
i have absolutely no idea why this is.
As far as i can figure, it's a combination of things including the fact that folks simply click on the link. Heh. This means that if you want to be successful with Google ranking, you've simply got to use the surrounding 151 characters in a way that grabs people by the short hairs.
Coolies. i can hardly wait for "Effective Site Design By Sound-Byte"
Yep, that's one of the reasons I switched to "static" layout. I haven't noticed any major difference between using ".html", ".php" or simply leaving off the extension. That's an interesting one to try. Believe it or not, I'm not really upset that blogs aren't listed more. I kind of consider blogs more noise than value, and would much rather go to an "official" site than here if I were searching for info.
My tuppence worth:
Anything important on a blog is going to come from a major blog (zeldman, pilgrim, pirello et al) or be passed down to one of these, and then on to an 'official' website.
Dunno, part of me is a blog whore who want's lots of visiters to my blog, and a bustleing comments section and community, the other part doesn't want the rif-raf coming round.
Bizarre
I don't konw about today, but when I first set things up with php scripts on my site (December 2001), URLs ended in .php for a while. The amount of spidering done by google and the number of incoming searches dropped off. When I figured out mod_rewrite and how to direct all the requests through php while still making it look like html, everything picked right back up.
Save This Page
I commented a bit about this at http://davespicks.com/archive/2003/0407.html#1049720103 Basic points: make permalinks that look static (make them end in .html) and don't rearrange your content. Google like stable, static sites, and blogs can do better by appearing as though they're stable and static, even if they're not.