Saturday, November 20, 2010

Some thoughts on using Google Blogger Blog


I am using this blogger blog (A product from Google) as my primary blog for sharing knowledge, analysing the latest news and announcing about our company updates and product releases.
Google Blogger For Dummies
Even this blog is  showing latest News aggregated using RSS feeds, Yahoo Pipes and Google Feedburner.

And, I would like to keep this blog (http://qualitypoint.blogspot.com) as my primary blog always.

But, I am frequently getting suggestions from many people about moving this blog to our own domain.

 They are telling two main reasons for moving this blog.

One is, domain name. They say own domain name will add some value to the blog comparing to the the .blogpot.com

Another reason is, blogger blog may be risky. Google can  introduce any rules at any time. It may affect us in some way. Having our own hosting will add more freedom.

I have many reasons to continue this blogger blog even when I already have own domains (qualitypointtech.com and qualitypointtech.net) . One important reason is, Google. As the blogger is powered by Google, we will get lot of features continously.

For  example, Google has recently added real time stats feature in the blogger dashboard itself. And, we can manage AdSense ads and Amazon affiliates products easily from blogger.

The Rational Guide to Google Blogger (Rational Guides)
Actually we are having a different approach also. Blogger is allowing to use our own domain name for the existing blogger blog. i-e Content will be hosted in Google servers, but we can use our own domain name.
I have tried this approach. But it is giving some message while doing redirection. So, I don't want to use this approach.




I had asked below question in LinkedIn

Currently I am having a blog and a website hosted on a shared hosting server.
Stability and up time of this shared hosting is less comparing to the blogger blog.

I am getting suggestions from many people for moving the blogger blog to the website.
But I am hesitating to do this due to various reasons e.g stability, bandwidth and backlinks (Refer http://qualitypointtech.net/forum/viewtopic.php?f=21&t=532)
So, which is best? Blogger blog? or Blog hosted on unstable shared hosting?
For this question, I got below answers. Mostly everyone is suggesting to have wordpress installed in stable hosting.



The best is a WordPress Blog hosted on a stable shared hosting provider (I recommend Host Gator). There are many others who do this well and inexpensively.

You can notify all your backlinks that you're moving, but it will be some work to convert your content. In the long run, though, it will be well worth it as you will own and control your content and site's PR (page rank) reputation.


If your building a personal or business brand I recommend moving to a more stable host provider. Which I provide for my clients by the way.

Having access to a server where you can install new plugins means you can develop your blog and brand over time. Wordpress for instance has a huge range of plugins that can extend the reach of your communication and provide an enriched reader experience. It's best to lay the ground work early on as best you can, rather than exporting and moving platforms again at a later date to accommodate new requirements as your blog grows.

Then if a time comes when you wish to sell the 'asset' it is all neatly sitting there on your hosting package.

Unstable hosting can be a nightmare, but don't let a bad experience deter you from a path that could be right for you.


Wordpress.com for hosted blog & Drupal 7


Don't bother with Blogger, use Wordpress. Either wordpress.com for a free hosted blog, or wordpress.org for a stand-alone self-hosted blog that gives you more freedom and blogging opportunities. You can use the .org blog as an extension to your website, eg URL/blog or blog.URL, and can easily design and optimise it to match your corporate image. Either are practical and fully SEO-ed.

Whether your website's server and hosting package can accommodate a Wordpress blog as an extension will need investigating, but if all is well, and your blog is part of your business, it may be more cost-worthy to do this.


Prefer your own hosted blog - shared or dedicated over blogger. Most of our blogs are hosted with IndiaHosting.org - fast-loading, less-crowded & white-listed servers to get SEO Advantage & Stability.


And you can read the discussion about blogger Vs. wordpress here.

Since I am comfortable with the blogger blog, as of now I am planning to continue this Blogger blog.

But I am having below questions.

  • Whether Google will always keep the blogger free?
  • Will Google expect some share in Ad revenue at some point of time?
  • Will Google provide any limitation of page loading capacity or bandwidth usage? i-e How many simultaneous visitors can load the blogger blog?
  • Will the search rank our blog be affected by the other blogger blogs? (i-e Whether any Search engine will see all blogger blogs as one blog from same person?)
  • Is it possible to get "News site" status if I publish News in this blogger blog? i-e Whether the News aggregation services such as Google News and Yahoo News will show our blog posts in News category instead of showing them under Blogs category?)
  • Can you tell me  any high traffic blog still using blogger (i-e.blogspot.com)?
  • Have you seen any *.blogspot.com post in Google News?
  • Finally, do you think that the name qualitypointtech.com or qualitypointtech.net gives more professional look than qualitypoint.blogspot.com?

Apart from these questions I am having one serious concern about using blogger blog. One of our blogger blog got locked one year back. But I couldn't unlock it even after taking steps recommended by Google help files. In fact I didn't get any email from Blogger in this one year.

The locked blog was not having much content. But, is there any possibility of same-thing happens  for this high traffic and content rich blog also? Have you heard about locking of any high traffic Blogger blog?


Even if I have this concern, I am planning to continue  the use of Blogger blog.


Apart from this primary  blog, our other blogs such Christmas blog also use Blogger only.

You can share your comments if you have more details about Google Blogger.
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