To Blogspot or not to Blogspot that is the question!

By Guest Blogger Phillip Dews

As a blogger myself I could be somewhat biased here but unless you just want to blog for fun I want to put my case forward as to why you need a self hosted wordpress blog in replace of a blogspot blog!
Lets assume you have an online business or you are an Internet Marketer with a blogspot blog. I am going to put forward my points as to why using a domain like “yourbusiness.blogspot.com instead of blog.yourbusiness.com/ yourbusiness.com is costing you more in Sales, SEO and link love.

BLOGSPOT is owned by Google. You may have your own company with your own website (e.g. yourcompany.com) and you have a blog attached to it but it’s that FREE one from the search giant. Google does NOT need your Help if you do have a blogspot blog for your business then you are not helping your business! But you are helping Google

You may, like me have been watching Alan Sugar’s The Apprentice recently, and if so, you will remember a candidate by the name of Stuart Baggs (The Brand), Well like an inquisitive blogger I decided to check out his company’s website Bluewave Communications on the Isle of Man and attached to the site is a blog. Low and behold it is a Blogspot blog from Google. Basically what Stuart is doing is depriving his primary website of any real Search Engine Optimisation and actually benefiting the search engine giant.

If like Stuart you have a company website and reading this then please do yourself and your website a favour by setting up a sub domain and create a FREE wordpress blog like “blog.yourmaindomain.com” after all you have paid for the domain and sub domains are free as well as WordPress. By doing this will benefit your Websites SEO no end and get you more traffic which inevitably means more sales!

But what if you already have an established business blog on Googles blogspot with lots of inbound link love to the site! Well dear reader I have some bad news for you! Technical geeks like me will tell you that in order to move a complete blog from one address to another is called a 301 permanent redirect. In normal circumstances where you own the 2 addresses you would not lose any link love you have built up over time. But with Googles Blogspot they will NOT let you Redirect all that SEO value, this dear reader is just not right after all you have worked hard on the blog and built up all those inbound links and Google will just keep it all themselves.

Not enough to make me call Google evil but at least think about it.
So is it easy to move from Blogspot to your own domain/sub domain then? Well you would of thought so and google do provide 2 Free APIs in order to do this. The first one however does NOT let you migrate all the comments left on the blog which is an important part of any blog as it help with SEO and the second only lets you migrate a few dozen posts to the new address – period which is just annoying and all that hard work goes down the drain.

Of course it is possible to migrate the lot over posts and comments but it will take a lot of custom coding and programming so unless you are a Savvy and technical Geek then I do not recommend you try this at home!
Summarising this post, Google provides Blogspot for free which is great for personal bloggers who want to do this as a hobbie but in my opinion for budding Business bloggers, internet marketers or bloggers who are serious about making a living from home then it most certainly is not free in value of Time, SEO and the professional look of your blog. I truly believe that having a self-hosted wordpress blog is the way forward in relation to building quality SEO, customers, subscribers, sales and most important of all Profit!

Want to know more about setting up a professional blog for yourself or business website? Then get in touch via my blog over at http://www.internetmarketing-101.co.uk/

All The Best
Phillip Dews

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