RWT Webmaster Tools Blog

Short Blog Posts or Long Blog Posts

Over at SEOmoz, EGOL is asking whether long blog posts or short blog posts make for a more effective blog. I added a comment stating I thought he would need a combination of both (something I have thinking about for this blog which tends to feature longer posts, I need to mix it up a bit). Anyway, as soon as I wrote that comment I went to look at articles I have flagged for later reading. Lo and behold, written six months ago, was a post on the Virtual Handshake blog about the same topic. In reference to a post about successful bloggers, VH concludes:

And he finds that most of their (many) posts are simply links to other people, not original content. These bloggers are in large part more DJs than original writers. There is so much data in the Net that any filter can generate value

So EGOL, there is another answer for you. The value of aggregation performed by a human being can’t be counted. If I look at sites like Instapundit or Winds of Change, they constantly display a combination of short and long posts. Long posts being more opinion oriented and short posts being more “hey, this is interesting.”