By Elmer on June 1, 2009

One of my blogs talk about my life in Hong Kong. I have been doing this for the past years and actually compiled more than 1,100 posts. It is rich in text content, and gets some generous portion of inbound links. I get fairly good search engine rankings. In fact, it’s on the first page for “living in hong kong” and “hong kong blog“. But reading Andy Beard’s post related to this subject matter made me think where could I have ended had I chose to use WordPress instead of Blogger/Blogspot.

Blogger was built by Pyra Labs and was subsequently acquired by Google without getting renamed for good reasons. (Urchin became Google Analytics and Applied Semantics became AdWords/AdSense). But the association between Blogger and Google does not guarantee favors in search engine results. In fact it could even be detrimental to other search services. My last check on search engine referrals showed Yahoo! did not refer any traffic. Early this year, traffic dropped significantly as my blog relies heavily on search referrals. I then found out that Blogger inserted robots.txt restricting search engine crawls to labels / categories / tags. As I had no control over this parameter, I was at the mercy of how Blogger wants to restrict flow of visitor traffic.

It’s understandable that Blogger does this control as many blogs are created with little or no significant contribution to blogosphere.

Lack of Categories
It’s sometimes difficult to understand that Blogger uses robots.txt to restrict access of search engines to Blogger blogs. Instead of just using a nofollow to labels, robots.txt was used to prevent crawling of such pages. This means link juice / PageRank value still flows into these category pages. But since they don’t get crawled, link popularity of individual posts are diluted into these category pages. Therefore, to prevent the bleeding, it’s best to nofollow the links pointing to each category page. Doing so is the question.

No Control Over Robots.txt
Since Blogger determines the value of robots.txt, so is the fate of my blog. I was thinking of moving this one to my personal website which have become idle for ages. However, as I post an additional blog each day, the more I appear to establish trust into the Blogger platform. It’s easy to maintain, it’s been established for the past five years and has gathered numerous citations. Not to mention I am glad to pick up that custom subdomain. But what if Blogger/Google decides to change its Robots.txt structure tomorrow? Any contingency plans for me? Yes, but it’s only about backing up previous posts.

Lessons learned from blogging on a Blogger platform:
1. Think about long term plans: should I blog for leisure (and just use Blogger) or I want to make a step forward further (and therefore consider something else)?
2. Consider SEO disadvantages of Blogger (no categorization, link juice issues, robots.txt issue)

So will you still consider using Blogger if you plan to do a blog?

Inspired by Andy Beard’s blog post.

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