The Problem With Blogger

November 30, 2007

For the amateur blog writer the popular Blogger site is probably a good place to start. It’s a free service that will allow you to set up your own little blog and start writing about whatever you want to. However, I have certain reservations about the sites usefulness as a professional blogging platform.

Moving House

The main problem I have is that once you start down the route of using Blogger, you are pretty much stuck with it for good. There seems to be little chance of uploading a .htaccess file to do a redirect if you need to move to a different domain. It is perfectly possible to recreate the blog on the other domain and import everything you have done in Blogger (Wordpress has this functionality as standard) but you will have to essentially start again. You will have to kill off your old Blogger blog and all of the search engine listings you have managed to gain will be lost for good. At least it is possible to prevent this if you set up your own service.

Front page links

The front page of Blogger has a nice little feature that allows users to view the best and most recently updated blogs on the site. However, these links are worthless to the actual blogs themselves because they link into a page on Google that uses a meta redirect to take the user to the correct page. Also all of the links are labelled with rel="nofollow" and so the only thing that the blogs get out of these links is a small amount of traffic.

The Blogs Themselves

The blogs themselves seem to be set out in an odd way. According to the front page it is possible to use an FTP client on the site, so why is it then that all of the sites I have looked at are filled with styles for the first 300-400 lines? This is just plain wrong from a search engine optimisation point of view, but also makes the page loading time longer as the stylesheet isn’t cached. Speaking of page load times every time I use the site I end up getting very frustrated due to the incredibly slow pages.

HTML validation

I had a quick look at a random selection of blogs and they all had at least 400 HTML validation errors. The worst of the bunch was a blog with a staggering 1192 errors. This must have an impact on the ability of search engine spiders to index the site.

Ease of Use

What’s this? A positive thing about Blogger? Not really. People say that the system is very easy to use, but this ease of use cuts you off from lots of things. With Wordpress you can do just about anything you can think of, when posting there are a multitude of options to select from, but you don’t have to use all of them. This is what makes Wordpress good for both new and experienced bloggers, as your experience grows, so will your blogging skills. Blogger doesn’t seem to encourage this.

Profitable Blogs?

In my opinion, no. I have been through about 20-30 blogs whilst writing this post and not one blog had any obvious advertising on them. I know that advertising isn’t meant to be obvious on the Internet or your users won’t click on it. I can usually spot advertising from the source code, but there wasn’t anything to be seen. Most of the top blogs are written by people who just like writing, which is fair enough. Some bloggers would like to write on their blogs full time, and the only way they can do that is by using a combination of advertising and being sponsored for posting.

So if you aren’t serious about blogging and are not looking to make any profit from your blog then Blogger might be a good choice for you. It might also be good if you know nothing about web design or SEO as it will start you off with no set up fee. However, if you are writing with the future intention of making money from the site then don’t use Blogger. If there is even a slight thought that you might go down that path then buy a domain and set up Wordpress or something on it. You can get lots of free cool looking templates and Wordpress is a great tool to use. Even if you want a custom template you can get a freelancer to do one for you for a minimal fee.

Phil
Programmer, Research and Development