REAL-TO-REEL: The strength of Portland's beer community became evident at the Aug. 20 premiere of the craft beer documentary film "The Love of Beer."

It’s hard to believe that three weeks have already passed since the 2011 Beer Bloggers Conference wrapped up in Portland, Ore. I still have plenty of content to share here on the blog from that trip—a tour of an Oregon Hop Farm during harvest, an informative visit with McMenamins’ head distiller James Whelan, and an afternoon at Logsdon Farmhouse Ales in Hood River, Ore., to name three—but a post last Friday by fellow attendee Brian Aldrich of Seacoast Beverage Lab put a perfect bow on the Portland conference. His post was entitled “Community of Beer Bloggers.”

Brian nailed it, because if I were to choose one word to represent the latest Beer Bloggers Conference, it would be “community.” The entire weekend oozed camaraderie and common goals, from the Thursday night pub crawl organized by Portland beer bloggers to Saturday night’s big-screen premiere of “The Love of Beer”—a documentary film that profiled several fascinating women in the craft beer industry. Coming home to Nashville after experiencing Portland’s tight-knit beer community left me simultaneously inspired and deflated. We’ve got a long way to go in Music City, and in the South in general.

But regardless of locale, blogs, almost as a rule, are agents for community. They allow for the pursuit of common interests and common experiences. Even the most personal, navel-gazing diary entries will likely attract kindred spirits among a public readership. And by focusing so much on community—with panels like “Working With Your Local Brewery” and “Lessons from Portland as a Beer (and Beer Blogging) City” and a presentation on “Blogging About (and Changing) Beer Laws”—the conference not only capitalized on a strong characteristic of its host city but gave attendees a key to extending the reach of their blogs as well.

BBC TWO: The 2011 Beer Bloggers Conference didn't present as much technical information at the 2010 conference, but its focus on community—with the great example of Portland's beer community as host—was vital.

It has to do with Google and that company’s recent “Panda” algorithm update to its massive search engine. Basically, in February 2011, Google changed the way it ranks pages, promoting sites that foster—you guessed it—community while not promoting sites that flood their pages with keywords or otherwise try to game the system for higher search rankings. The methods Google uses to determine what ranks first when you search for “beer” or any other term remain a tightly guarded secret. And I’m no search engine expert but I can read—and read between the lines; Google’s guidance from software engineer Amit Singhal gives a pretty clear indication of what type of content a blog should focus on to boost its page rank. For example, Singhal suggests asking yourself the following questions (among many others—see the previous link) when creating content for your site: “Are the topics driven by genuine interests of readers of the site, or does the site generate content by attempting to guess what might rank well in search engines? … Is this the sort of page you’d want to bookmark, share with a friend, or recommend?”

In other words, you are now rewarded for generating content that engages readers, drives conversation, and compels others to share that content. It’s basically a bonus for fostering community and being authentic. If you are successful at creating a community around your blog and your peers’ blogs and the craft beer scene as a whole, your efforts will breed success in the form of increased reach—through word of mouth and higher Google page rank (meaning more people find your site).

When compared to the 2010 Beer Bloggers Conference in Boulder, Colo., which I also attended, the 2011 version in Portland wasn’t particularly technical. There were no presentations on search engine optimization and few discussions of blogging software, plug-ins and the like. But for five nights I lived in among an amazing beer community. I saw how it worked. I learned from its pillars. I am now friends with people who have done what I want to do in my city.

Since its “Panda” update, Google is now elevating my efforts as I genuinely strive to engage and grow the craft beer and homebrew communities. So ultimately, the 2011 Beer Bloggers Conference—which didn’t seem to offer that much technical advice at first glance—gave me what is arguably the most valuable technical advice of all for my blog: a means to build an even larger community.

Related posts:

1. A Call to Action: Growing the Beer Bloggers Conference
2. Hopping Up to Portland
3. Koch, Glenn Challenge Beer Bloggers to Investigate