Why do blog portals and communities struggle? The short answer is relevance. Here's a scenario that will help you understand what I mean. If you give a single blogger three categories (i.e., channels with very specific titles that focus on separate topics) and you encourage him/her to write lots of blog posts, the content in each channel will be approximately focused on the pre-defined titles of each channel category. If you give 200 bloggers each a blog channel about themselves (or focused on their name or company name), they will write about anything and everything on their minds - e.g., the content will lack a specific focus. In this scenario, search engines will see each blog in the community as a collection of disparate ideas. Furthermore, the search engines will see the weblog portal as an even more disparate collection of ideas and mildly related subjects. Search engines love focused content - the more a content channel is about ONE thing, the more likely it will be recommendable by an engine when visitors call for that EXACT subject. For this reason, community blog content is hoplessly at a competitive disadvantage if your objective is to rank high in search results and for many terms. Here are some real [Google] examples from ActiveRain... Here are some blog visibility examples from a few "brand-greedy" real estate bloggers; Vail Property Search in Vail, Colorado and SnowHome in Summit County, Colorado. These examples demonstrate why focus and content relevance matters. But the issues concerning the blogging architecture are many. For example, the keyword tags added to posts in ActiveRain are not tag-service compliant. This is important if you want to participate in the emerging benefits of tagging - one benefit is better indexing of your content by search engines. SnowHome (one of the companies in the search examples) has a Topic Cloud of their tags which enhances discoverability by search engines and visitors. I used the term "brand-greedy" above; to clarify, this is a new idea that has emerged because most blogging tools dictate the URL of your weblog. Brand-greedy companies want the URL to be similar or a superset of their primary web site domain name. In weblog portals and communities, all the inbound links you generate with your content are given to the community, not your own brand or company domain. This is yet another success factor when blogging for better Internet visibility. | 
