The Blogger SEO Burden

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The Blogger SEO Burden

By Chris Crum - Fri, 01/09/2009 - 14:36

Drawbacks to Google's Blogging Platform

There is no question that blogging can help improve your search engine optimization efforts. Stephan Spencer, Founder & President Netconcepts talked about some of the reasons why in the following video, but he also said he favors some platforms over others for SEO purposes. Namely, he recommends WordPress or b2evolution as opposed to Google-owned Blogger.

More WebProNews Videos

While Spencer may be right about Blogger not being as good for SEO purposes, it raises the question: Why would a blog platform owned by Google itself carry a greater burden for getting good rankings on the very search engine that everyone strives to rank well in? I contacted Spencer to get his thoughts on just that.

"I don't think it is intentional on Google's part," says Spencer. "The developers of Blogger designed it for simplicity and usability (the "KISS" principle). They 'didn't know what they didn't know' -- and that unfortunately included SEO."

"Believe it or not, the search engines are not expert at SEO," Spencer continued. "They are expert at search algorithms, which is a very different thing. In fact, several search engines hired us at various times to advise them on SEO, i.e. to help them get their own sites to rank better in Google! The engineers don't have the deep SEO experience that allows them to make SEO-informed decisions around functionality (like support for tag clouds), site architecture & internal linking structure (e.g. the way they handle pagination), design and layout, etc."

Spencer touched upon on a few of these things that Blogger lacks for SEO purposes in the above video. He also followed up with me:

BTW, this one takes the cake... the tag pages on Blogger (actually referred to as "labels" by Blogger) are disallowed by the robots.txt file! They are within the search directory, which is disallowed:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /search

Doh!

Spencer also notes in the video, that "it's really hard to get off of it once you're on it," and there are many, many people using Blogger. Even if the platform isn't great for SEO purposes, there are still some things that you can do to help somewhat. People have offered SEO tips for Blogger in the past.

This article is about two and a half years old, but Wayne Hurlbert offers some in it. SEO Kolkata also had some suggestions about a year ago.

News Tags: Search, Google, SEO, search engine optimization, blogging, blogger

About the author:
Chris Crum has been a part of the WebProNews team and the iEntry Network of B2B Publications since 2003.

21 Comments

By Organic seo (WPN reader) - Sun, 06/14/2009 - 20:03

I use wordpress and there

I use wordpress and there are a number of plugins that can help improve on-page seo, e.g. seo-all-in-one and seo siloing.
Thanks for sharing the video and the artricle.

regards,
John

By Hills Clothes Lines (WPN reader) - Sat, 05/30/2009 - 20:40

Wordpress

Lucky my blog is a wordpress one then. Ill need to do some more research on optimising it though.

By Salisbury Lettings (WPN reader) - Fri, 05/22/2009 - 09:21

Wordpress...

Thanks - great article, I think I am going to stick to Wordpress for my blogs which I have found excellent for SEO for my letting websites.

By lida fx15 gazeteler biber hapı noraseo saat (WPN reader) - Mon, 05/18/2009 - 15:16

Thanks.

i love blogger
thanks for sharing

By David Bergeron (WPN reader) - Sat, 04/25/2009 - 04:44

All the content on your

All the content on your blogger site is still indexed..If google indexed search pages then there would be duplicate content.

By Sourav sen (WPN reader) - Mon, 02/23/2009 - 00:16

Blogger is best

Well I have used both wordpress and blogger but my blog in the blogger have come up in the search results whereas wordpress blog
is performing extremely bad.

By CBSE (WPN reader) - Sun, 02/01/2009 - 06:13

I am running over 10 blogs

I am running over 10 blogs in blogger and completely satisfied with the service.

Thanks to blogger and google team.

By Lisa Rise (WPN reader) - Mon, 01/26/2009 - 04:48

i think

i use blogspot, and i think that is great one.

By Seo Blah! (WPN reader) - Wed, 01/21/2009 - 04:20

I thought google was smarter

To be honest I thought google would hire a group of experts in seo to test their algorithm or something. They better get on the ball.

By SEO Homestead Website (WPN reader) - Tue, 01/20/2009 - 22:28

I use Wordpress and

I use Wordpress and Blogspot.

I definitely prefer Wordpress, it's like having a blog on steroids. Write your content and titles correctly and your heading to the front page, if you choose your keywords carefully.

I have accomplished some very good rankings with Goggle blog by creating back links.

This is an excellent video, thanks for sharing.

By wensiz (WPN reader) - Sat, 01/17/2009 - 02:09

hi

interesting news, cause i still using blogger.

which blogger or WordPress or b2evolution the best?

By Minneapolis SEO (WPN reader) - Fri, 01/16/2009 - 15:03

huh

This is interesting news, as I am still using blogger. I suppose it is time to do some tests on this again.

By Play Online Games (WPN reader) - Tue, 01/13/2009 - 08:11

I am still wondering why

I am still wondering why would a blog platform owned by Google itself carry a greater burden for getting good rankings on the very search engine that everyone strives to rank well in?

By Stock Trading (WPN reader) - Mon, 01/12/2009 - 14:15

SEO

Is there some secret to getting a comment posted here ? I've tried twice and got nowhere, so this is comment no. 3 which of course has nothin gto do with SEO, but my two previous ones did.

By Rank On Top (WPN reader) - Tue, 01/13/2009 - 00:56

yes lower right corner, login

By Jaimee (WPN reader) - Mon, 01/12/2009 - 07:18

wordpress is good

wordpress is good and the best right now with the user friendly seo and mostly support for more plugins to use it.

By Website Design Firm (WPN reader) - Mon, 01/12/2009 - 06:46

Wordpress is best

I think wordpress is best. Moreover, my experience with wordpress for SEO has always been good. if you are using wordpress for your blogging purpose or other SEO related issues such as getting links indexed then believe me - You Have Made The Right Decision

By Aris Dizdarevic (WPN reader) - Mon, 01/12/2009 - 02:57

Blog for SEO

Chris - I agree with you blog can help you get better PR. But I think wordpress is as good as b2evolution. All you need is a little bit of knowledge and few plugins and it can be equally good as and other blog software.

And thanks for the article.

By James Allen (WPN reader) - Sun, 01/11/2009 - 18:50

Bloggers SEO impact

Hi Steve,

I assure you that the blogspot platform is SE friendly, but I tested it out last year and found that it lacked the ability to pass page rank to another website.

By Minneapolis, Mn Internet marketing, Rank On Top, Inc. (WPN reader) - Sun, 01/11/2009 - 18:38

Wordpress Rules for Seo with google and Yahoo.

We just went public last month and have been a behind the scenes company,

Well we decided to use a wordpress blog instead of an actuall website or Joomla,

Withing the 3rd week we had a pagerank of three for our homepage and now have a pagerank of two for our contact page,

Wordpress just makes it easier to utilize all the tools needs for keywords and for meta, and web 2.0.

So yes, Google-owned Blogger actually can hold you back if you dot know what your doing.

Great article Chris.

By Steve Sherron (WPN reader) - Sun, 01/11/2009 - 11:12

Some of the most sought

Some of the most sought after keyword terms and phrases are sitting on the front page of Google by bloggers using the Google Blogspot platform. Search "Make money online" and see what you find. Look at the number one and number 3 spot. What platform do they use? I recently took a fairly competitive keyword phrase to #1 on Google myself using a blogspot blog as an SEO experiment. I prefer Wordpress myself, but I do not necessarily agree with the statements in this article.