I mentioned in a blog post that Blogspot is like cat pee. I was asked to expand on that.
The issue I have with it is that it’s hard to get your data out of the site once you start and redirecting spiders and Google to your new blog if you do escape is difficult to impossible. So for me it does not give you as many options as other blogging software and no plugin support but also if you move to your own domain, a hell of a lot of traffic will still go to the old site. Google “Twenty Major” and his old blogspot blog comes up 3rd or 4th in searches.
When it comes to business blogs it irks me a bit that Blogger/Blogspot gets all the linklove instead of the company even when they do decide to move the blogs to the main domain.
Cat pee. Is there an easy way to redirect with blogger/blogspot?
Rob mentions though that WordPress.com sticks ads on your blog and doesn’t give you a choice whereas blogger does.
My old blogspot thing comes up third. Bastards.
Besides that, it took nearly a year to get back to where I was on Technorati, and I found redirecting to my own domain almost impossible.
Even if none of that was a problem, though, the question is, do you want Google to own all your content?
The worst thing using blogger for me is when you publish to an external url it always times out and you have to click retry several times. It’s soul destroying.
Have been meaning to switch to wordpress for a while now. I switched someone else’s blog over to wordpress at the weekend and it was unbelievably easy to import from blogger. And much easier to reskin – with wordpress hosted on the site server.
J.
I moved from blogspot to a hosted blog using WordPress. I set up a redirect using this method to import old posts but it took a bit of tweaking and even then wasn’t perfect.
You can also redirect using the Blogger control panel. Go to Settings>Publishing>Custom Domain>Switch to advance settings. Enter your new domain in the box. Blogspot will now redirect to your new domain. My PR seemed to travel with this redirect as well.
This probably isn’t advisable unless you’ve imported your old blogspot posts to your new hosted site as your old posts will simply redirect to the new URL. It also might be worth setting up a test blogspot to do a dry-run.
Blogspot blogs really do get high search rankings though. I remember seeing an Irish blog show up as first on a particular search less than 10 minutes after publishing the post.
If you visit my old Blogspot domain it now redirects to my new parked domain. I purchased the domain through google and blogspot so probably why.
Its a pain to move from blogger. I had to go from Blogger to free wordpress then to hosted wordpress.
It is free i suppose.
Not just blogspot, Twenty. I put up a post about Brian Rossiter last night and it was on the front page of Google in 5 minutes. Very strange.
It’s also important to note that if you start blogging on WP.com using the wp.com domain name, there’s no way to do a 301 redirect either.
Best solution? Start with your own domain name and hosting account with your own installation of your preferred blogging software. More control in the beginning and less headache trying to move later.
Or, at very least, use domain mapping from the very beginning.
~ Teli
Does anyone even use blogspot anymore?
It’s worth noting that the Blogger GData API could be used for automating the move by pulling down the data and replacing the entries with redirects of some kind, most likely using JavaScript or something along the lines of
<meta http-equiv="refresh" content="1; url=http://example.com/">, along with a link.Would the fact that google own blogger have anything to do with the blogspot sites being ranked so highly?
I used blogspot until recently. Sites are gradually changing over but it can be a pain and you loose settings comments etc
RedMum is still blogger and i think thats where shes staying AFAIK. Roy (IRish Taxi ) just recently moved over too
When I first read your statement about blogger being like cats piss I felt an uneasy feeling inside me, like I would if someone said my daughter had very large feet indeed and then I remembered that post I did recently which required several photographs and how blogger kept me waiting hours to download the photos ONE BY ONE and then refused to post several of them at all.
That was when those buried feelings of resentment towards blogger rose to the surface and I thought Yea, he’s right. In fact they’re shite. So shite that they should be shot with their own balls of shite.
I can understand why you left. I’m considering leaving them also.
I was going to make the WP move but then I figured I had socks to iron instead so I thought better of it.
@Paul McClean Says: Does anyone even use blogspot anymore?
http://postsecret.blogspot.com
http://googleblog.blogspot.com
http://indexed.blogspot.com
and my own effort.
I’m happy enough with blogspot. I wouldn’t consider myself as a “serious” blogger and am just happy with my little space in the bloggopolis. Once I get the time to move everything over it will be WordPress for me but for now I’m content. Unread, but content 😉
Sigh.
I wish this post (& comments) was around to read before I signed up for my new Blog(spot) a few weeks ago…
Agreed, though I would say that blogspot is important in that it’s ‘piss easy’ to set up and leads a lot of people into blogging and online culture. I just wish they’d make a greater effort on features.
Average price of a basic website is min EUR1000 i guess. The more people realise that you can get effective online presense through blogs, the better for the culture of online entrepreneurship in Ireland.
Template choice and commenting system are poor on Blogspot and many of the reasons mentioned above.
if you want your blogspot blog to stop stealing your SERP, you need to remove it’s content. (don’t go deleting posts, you never know when you might need an archive). Edit your template to remove the code for the posts themselves, as well as the archives in the sidebar. change the header (h1) link to link to your new blog, and use a javascript/flash rss reader to syndicate your new blog’s feed, and your blogspot blog starts flowing all the good search engine juice towards your new blog.
not quite as good as being able to set up 301’s, but close. example
If your new blog is on a domain you own, then you can have blogger redirect traffic to that domain (see advanced publishing options).
As for blogspot magically getting higher search positions, that has not generally been my experience. I wouldn’t be amazed if it did better than wordpress.com because of that service’s bizarre linking setup (tags on users’ posts generally link to a GLOBAL tags page; for a while this shoved many wordpress tag pages to the top of various common searches, but Google seems to have dealt with it now), but I certainly haven’t seen any such effect with self-hosted Movable Type and WordPress blogs.