Hosting Your Blog on BlogSpot.com?
Posted on November 23, 2005
Hosting A Blog on BlogSpot.com?
Stop! It’s time to get serious with your content, about your business, and show some credibility…
The best thing you can do for website sales, promotion and readership is to get your blog off blogspot.com. BlogSpot blogs are good for one thing and one thing only - to give you some free inbound links to your real site or domain.
Free BlogSpot blogs are not good for traffic, search engine optimization, or a reader’s perception of you.
Let me put it to you this way…when I happen upon a blogspot hosted blog my first thought is “this person doesn’t take themselves or their business serious enough to give their blog or ’site’ a real home.”
Blogspot hosted blogs get about as much respect as free websites like angelfire, or freeyellow.com sites. Of course that could just be me being a web snob, but I’ve got blogs in both places and have worked equally hard at promoting both types and WordPress on a dedicated domain wins hands down for traffic, search engine optimization and credibility.
Plus - and this is a biggie - BlogSpot is now considered a search engine spammer’s playground. Thousands of marketers and wanna be marketers can easily create hundreds of blogspot blogs to drive traffic, add links to our main urls, and parse free content to blogspot blogs. The outcome? Google has almost given up on indexing or for that matter including blogspot blogs in their natural search engine listings.
Can’t Stand to Switch?
Now if you’re already used to blogger and you don’t have time to learn a new program, there is an easy solution to move your blogspot hosted blog AND keep your content AND keep using blogger as your blogging software AND not lose any content. I haven’t done it, but I imagine it’s easy enough due to the simplistic nature of the software. You can install Google’s blogger software on your own domain. After that adding content, photos, scripts, etc. is the exact same user interface as you’ve been using over at BlogSpot.com.
Take note though…
Blogger installed on your on site isn’t anywhere near as powerful or as much of a search engine magnet as WordPress installed on your site.
The only reason I’m throwing that option into this conversation is if you don’t already have your heart set on blogger, then you really should be using WordPress. Support is better, search engine optimization is better, the RSS feeds WordPress generates is better, modifications and available extras are better - and, WordPress is getting better all the time as thousands of programmers around the world work diligently to add new features and offer new products to make WordPress even more powerful than it is currently.
The short answer on which types of blogs and where to host them, from best to worst case scenarios:
a) WordPress blog on dedicated domain
b) Blogger blog on dedicated domain
c) blogspot hosted blog
We can keep discussing this if you like…feel free to fire questions at me.
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P.S. If you think installing WordPress on a domain is difficult or only for geeks, think again. If you have cPanel managed hosting you can install WordPress in about 3 clicks using the Fantastico tab. My preferred host(with cPanel and Fantastico) is only $9/month and can host/manage/run multiple domains, email addresses, and scripts.
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5 Replies to “Hosting Your Blog on BlogSpot.com?”
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Hi Laura,
I have Wordpress.
I tried Blogger.com. NO TRAFFIC!!!!!!
Can you suggest a hosting company that will install WordPress, with as little effort as possible? I am not a techie, so this is not easy for me.
Any thing you offer, would be a great help!
Thanks.
Ed Mudge
Finally!
Someone else wrote about why blogspot-hosted blogs ‘bite’!
See Jason Cain’s latest article at http://goldblogger.com/wordpress/archives/screw-bloggercom-it-sucks-a/
My entire stream of posts on this topic started in mid-November because a well known blogging expert told my mentor the smartest thing he should do is get a free blogger blogspot hosted account and start writing to it. I heartily disagreed and it broke my heart when I was asked to ’state my case’ and sell him on the benefits to owner hosted WordPress blogs.
Broke my heart? Yes, because he didn’t have faith and trust in my knowledge and skills (even though I have a long list of people who I’ve helped to get traffic, rank and positioning in the search engines), but also because as a result of this, I lost the ‘awe’ I had for my mentor (because he didn’t see the ‘flaw’ in spending time, energy and money in building traffic and credibility to a site hosted on sand.
Folks, if you’ve got a blogspot hosted blog that you care about - get that content onto your own .com!
Your business, your traffic, your sales, - whatever - will thank you for it.
Laura
p.s. Remember, just because some expert, or guru, or even your mentor says ‘this is so’ doesn’t mean you can’t add an ounce of common sense to the advice.
But from my experienced, Google’s team had already optimized their blogger’s blogs….
If you always surf internet, you’ll realize that Blogger’s blogs usually came out at first page especially in Google search result.
I personally think that Blogger.com is not really bad as you think….. and half of my adsense revenue came from Blogger.com blogs.
Let’s Get Serious About Online Business Success
Hello Stand Upon and all others who may read that post above…
All opinions are appreciated here but I have to say that I do always surf the internet and have been for (yay! just celebrated my anniversary) 10 years now.
Oddly enough I seldom see blogger blogs coming up on the top of the results and I do search for many terms, phrases, etc. when doing research for my niches and potential niches.
Aside from the fact that google is generally my starting point for research and I seldom see blogspot or blogger blogs in the top results, I stand by my stance on how blogger is bad for business.
You’re building a business that you don’t own, making a url popular that isn’t yours - why would you DO that when you can get the same results to a domain that you DO own, can sell at some later point, and appear more respectable and trustworthy in the process to your visitors?
It’s the difference between working for a living or owning your own business. It’s, perhaps more precisely, like renting an apartment and doing hours and thousands of dollars of renovations, then moving out - what have you to show for your hard work and promotion efforts?
Why wouldn’t you spend $13 and do all that work to something you do own, can sell, and grow over time? I have many sites that have a blog, some html pages, a forum, and a store - can you do all that from your blogger url?
This is likely the last time I’m going to discuss this. People either get it, or they don’t. If you’re just playing at your business then get a blogger account, but if you’re serious about working from home and making money online, get an $8 domain from godaddy and a hosting account for $5/month from this hosting service or any other ‘best host’ you find.
Sincerely,
Laura
p.s. Stand Upon I checked out your blog and see that you’re a student in Malaysia chatting about the life of a student. I repeat ‘playing at business’ which is not what I’m sharing on this site - I’m sharing ’succeeding at online business’.