This post comes out of my own experience and has been prompted by a fellow blogger at Web Development.
I am in the middle of a serious redevelopment of my site which will soon be going from the Blogger platform to WordPress and paid hosting. The reason is nothing to do with Blogger and SEO it is simply to allow me more flexibility and I will go into more detail later in this post.
I am not going to turn this post into a full blown Blogger/WordPress debate, I simply want to highlight where I think wordpress has the edge, but at the same time explain why Blogger can also be powerful
Code To Content
I stated before in previous posts that the code to content ratio means less now Google is capable of downloading massive files, however I still believe less code leads to more prominence on your text or keywords.
This becomes an issue on blogger as all your CSS elements are on your pages, this seriously increases your code to content ratio and I believe dilutes the effect of your body text and headings. I wouldn’t say it plays a massive factor in ranking but it is recommendable to have your page as tidy as possible. CSS on WordPress is kept in a separate file and allows less page clutter
Static Pages
The ability to have static pages is a big plus for search engine optimisation efforts. You can dedicate pages to set keywords, optimise and target links back to those pages. Now you can also do this with blogger posts, however the page would still include static elements from every other page of your blog, for instance my picture and images appear on every page, this is something I can overcome with WordPress.
This is design and SEO related but I believe a professional looking site decreases bounce rates and SEO is all about delivering profitable organic traffic.
Editing Code
Blogger is all round an easier platform to work with and edits can be made directly to your blog template. WordPress requires plugins and “some” can be temperamental. Editing titles, headings and other code on Blogger requires little effort, WordPress requires a little more but the same results can now be achieved.
The H1 Tag
One of my personal gripes with the Blogger template is the inability to create a unique H1 for each page. The H1 tag is the main description of your on page content after your title tag, therefore it is important to make it diverse throughout your pages.
WordPress makes this possible and allows you to focus your pages that bit better.
My Conclusion
Apart from the odd little tweaks that WordPress allows there isn’t that much difference in ranking abilities. In fact I would say I have ranked Blogger blogs quicker than WordPress blogs on average, but really the timescales are hardly worth debating. Both are capable of competent search engine optimisation.
So you might be wondering why I am making the switch? Well, when I first started this blog it was really to put together a list of helpful tutorials. I had no idea I would have over 100 readers and 150 visitors from organic traffic a day, within the first three months. I also started offering services as a consultant and enquiries have been coming in fast, so much so that I have had to take on 2 members of staff.
The reason why I am switching is to simply aid the growth of this blog, to keep updating you guys with helpful tips and news whilst still attracting new clients. The new site design will be more user friendly and I hope create even greater interaction
We are experiencing a few difficulties at the minute but things should be ironed out by July time.
So……. In my opinion Blogger or WordPress can be ranked just as well in the SERPS. The reason I would choose to use WordPress paid hosting is if my site was more commercially based as it gives you the opportunity to attract new readers as well as new clients.
Let me know what you guys think and any experiences you have had, I love Blogger and will continue to use it, I just hope I keep hold of my Blogger readers despite the switch
Tim Grice is the owner and editor of SEO wizz and has been involved in the search engine marketing industry for over 7 years. He has worked with multiple businesses across many verticals, creating and implementing search marketing strategies for companies in the UK, US and across Europe. Tim is also the Head of Search at Branded3, an SEO agency in Leeds.
I use both Blogger and Wordpress and both are capable of drawing in vast amounts of search engine traffic.
I get hundreds of hits a day on my posts on blogger and thats why I am haveing to create identical permalinks so I don’t get slapped with a duplicate content penalty.
For me Wordpress just gives me that little more flexibility as my blog continues to grow. I still have many projects on Blogger and have no plans to change them
Thanks for the comparison! I’ve been wondering about this for a while now. Blogger works best for me at this point, since I’m still learning how to code; blogger’s “usability” has me hooked. Maybe when I learn more I’ll make the switch.
I’d love to hear more tips from you on how to optimize personal blogs for visibility – congrats on your own success!
Blogger is much easier and when you can drive traffic to it just as easily it sometimes becomes a no brainer. Wordpress simply takes SEO Wizz to the next level, I hope it will be a positive change and I will still be giving all my blogger readers some relevant pieces of advice.
In fact everything I have on this site will help you optimise you blogger blog. The tutorials are a good place to start.
It doesn’t matter what sort of SEO you are doing or what sort of traffic you get from search if you don’t look and act like a professional. Blogger will never provide that, it will always be associated with half-assed free blogs for spammers.
I have to say that there are a lot of Bloggers who manage to put together clean looking sites. It does however carry that “spammy” stigma” because it is so easy to put together.
I think the problem is not only spammers but also those who are trying to make MFA sites, publish blog, scrape content, make a $ a day on adsense.
Blogger is the platform newbies can quickly learn to use and thats why it is so prominant on blogger. I still think with a little CSS and xhtml knowledge you can make you blogger professionalish .
A lot of people think that Google favors Blogger users which isn’t true. To be honest, Wordpress has a lot more better professional themes and I know you are trying to brand yourself. Better image + better plugins can’t go wrong with that. You should switch now.
I am trying to brand SEO Wizz, I have some big plans and need a more flexible platform. The switch should be complete by the end of July, hopefully with custom logo and theme
Just have to make sure all my important content is filed and indexed correctly and that I can appropriately redirect my feed.
I have ranked many sites without the W3C validation and let’s face it if Google were that bothered about it and how it relates to high rankings they would sort out these blogger templates.
W3C may have more emphasis put on it in the future but for now it isn’t that big a deal.
I wouldn’t waste time trying to validate either, I had about 500 errors on SEO Wizz, tried going through them and gave up after a couple of hours and only sorting 3 or 4.
In the next week I am moving SEO Wizz onto the Thesis theme on Wordpress, it’s one of the best I have come across in a while.
I’m glad blogger and wordpress are ranked pretty much equal in terms of SEO. However, I would have thought that google with give blogger a slight edge over wordpress, because after all, they are related.
In my experience the only difference is that blogger sends more referral traffic. I use both wordpress and blogger and have never noticed a difference in the time it takes to get ranked for certain keywords. I will say, however, that wordpress allows you to create a static home page which you can optimise for your keywords, with blogger your homepage content is always changing leaving your rankings somewhat erractic until you have solid link profile.
Tim,
I have had a blog up with blogger for two months with 0 traffic and analytics, when I know friends have come and used the site. W3c says there are over 400 errors. Is that why I get zero analytics? 2 months? What can I do? I thought it was the code errors. They are pretty much all html stuff. Why no traffic data? Would appreciate your experienced input. Do I stay? I have adsense on it, but no movement. I hesitate reaching out, ie., outsourcing with all of those errors.
Don’t Panic. The W3c errors are nothing to do with your lack of traffic, all blogger blogs have them and it’s normally due to old outdated html attributes, don’t worry. The first thing I need you to do is apply Google analytics, visit http://www.google.com/analytics/ sign up for an account and paste the relevant tracking code just above your tag.
Go to you blogger panel, layout and edit html, expand all widgets and paste the code in.
Now you can really see whats hitting your blog without relying on adsense views. If Google adsense notices the same ip’s visiting over and over again it can actually stop showing them as impressions.
Anyway besides the above their are a few fundamental problems with your blog.
1 – You need to think about the keywords your targeting and have them in a title and sub title. Also think about the anchor text when you making links.
2 – You have no links so forget blog commenting, go out and write a few articles and publush them on ezine and go articles.
3 – Try to write your on your blog 3 times a week and link from your posts back to your homepage.
You will have to copy and paste a meta tag into the section of your blog. Once you do this confirm it on webmaster tools and submit a sitemap. The site map for your blogger would be http://florasfauna.blogspot.com/atom.xml.
If you do this there is no reason why you should not see at least some blogger referall traffic, you need to build more links to see search engine traffic. The main thing is don’t pay anyone to fix the errors because this has nothing to do with traffic.
I agree you with the whole flexibility of wordpress and the far superior technology, but I have seen Blogger blogs and WP blogs indexed equally as quick and seen results in the index to happen just as quick. One thing I would also add to the wordpress argument is that it gives a more professional feel and therefore allows you to grow your blog faster socially.
Great post, lots of useful info. was wondering, do you need your blog to be hosted on your own site(www.yourdomain.com/blog) or can a person become successful with a yourblog.blogspot.com site? I have heard that having your blog on blogspot(or other free blog) makes people think that your blog is newbie-ish and unprofessional,and really hurts the traffic and profits. Has any blog like that achieved success monetarily? What do you think?
You can perform SEO successfully on a hosted or self hosted platform. I have seen many free blogs do very well in Google and make plenty of money from it. Just check out Griz’s Blog, ugly, free blogger template and sits at the top of Google for “make money” so you can imagine how much money is made from it, thousands every month.
On the other hand if your looking for a more professional platform you really do need to invest a little, you can make money online without it but if you want to brand yourself and make your site user friendly you need to invest. Thats my opinion anyway.
I am still so unsure about all these. You know, I had my blog hosted in blogger and in three months I did managed to obtain a PR4. I don’t use the default blogger template and instead use a wordpress template ported to blogger(you can find plenty of them for free anyway). And I own my own domain name, which I bought through blogger itself, so that, I didn’t had to do anything after buying the domain. No playing with DNS or anything.
Google indexed my new domain name in days and within a month all my pages were re indexed. So even after changing domain name after posting so many content and getting a PR3, I still managed to get back all my google juice and PR in 2 months or so. And my blog looks as “professional” as any wordpress blog and all I spend is a 10$/year for my domain name. Why should I even think about a new self hosted wordpress blog??Boy I am confused. Tim, can you help? Thanks
First off let me say I don’t have any issues with blogger, I have a few blogger blogs with customised templates and a unique domain. The reason why I prefer wordpress is down to simple functionality, you can do whatever you want with, create a directory, individual pages, clever plugins and java functions. Self hosting is more expensive but at the same time it gives you far more control, for example how would redirect a deep page on blogger??
Blogger is a good starter platform and if you have managed to get some rankings I wouldn’t recommend changing, however I think wordpress allows you to take your skills and professionalism to the next level.
i am using blogger for long time.and i think it is best.
I also used wordpress and i have also blog on it but the thing is i feel easy on blogger rather than wordpress
I prefer Blogger. Though I am using wordpress currently, my experience with blogger is they will get indexed faster and get more traffic.
Bandwidth is also not an issue with blogger. The only thing that blogger lack is the ability to put description per page and the url cannot be customize. Other things on blogger is more preferable compared to wordpress with the ever changing development.
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I am staying with Blogger. Much of my traffic comes from previous posts through Google. For me, that is success.
My website designer son (and business partner) is a WordPress friend and guru.
Different strokes!
Hi Gred,
I use both Blogger and Wordpress and both are capable of drawing in vast amounts of search engine traffic.
I get hundreds of hits a day on my posts on blogger and thats why I am haveing to create identical permalinks so I don’t get slapped with a duplicate content penalty.
For me Wordpress just gives me that little more flexibility as my blog continues to grow. I still have many projects on Blogger and have no plans to change them
Thanks for dropping in:)
Thanks for the comparison! I’ve been wondering about this for a while now. Blogger works best for me at this point, since I’m still learning how to code; blogger’s “usability” has me hooked. Maybe when I learn more I’ll make the switch.
I’d love to hear more tips from you on how to optimize personal blogs for visibility – congrats on your own success!
Hi Marjorie,
Blogger is much easier and when you can drive traffic to it just as easily it sometimes becomes a no brainer. Wordpress simply takes SEO Wizz to the next level, I hope it will be a positive change and I will still be giving all my blogger readers some relevant pieces of advice.
In fact everything I have on this site will help you optimise you blogger blog. The tutorials are a good place to start.
It doesn’t matter what sort of SEO you are doing or what sort of traffic you get from search if you don’t look and act like a professional. Blogger will never provide that, it will always be associated with half-assed free blogs for spammers.
@Brad,
I have to say that there are a lot of Bloggers who manage to put together clean looking sites. It does however carry that “spammy” stigma” because it is so easy to put together.
I think the problem is not only spammers but also those who are trying to make MFA sites, publish blog, scrape content, make a $ a day on adsense.
Blogger is the platform newbies can quickly learn to use and thats why it is so prominant on blogger. I still think with a little CSS and xhtml knowledge you can make you blogger professionalish .
A lot of people think that Google favors Blogger users which isn’t true. To be honest, Wordpress has a lot more better professional themes and I know you are trying to brand yourself. Better image + better plugins can’t go wrong with that. You should switch now.
@ Kai,
I am trying to brand SEO Wizz, I have some big plans and need a more flexible platform. The switch should be complete by the end of July, hopefully with custom logo and theme
Just have to make sure all my important content is filed and indexed correctly and that I can appropriately redirect my feed.
Thanks for the awesome post. My biggest gripe with blogger is that the templates don’t validate. Wordpress seems to validate like cake.
The Blogger navbar that you can’t get rid of without paid hosting doesn’t even validate.
Am I putting too much emphasis on W3C validation?
@codesucker,
I have ranked many sites without the W3C validation and let’s face it if Google were that bothered about it and how it relates to high rankings they would sort out these blogger templates.
W3C may have more emphasis put on it in the future but for now it isn’t that big a deal.
I wouldn’t waste time trying to validate either, I had about 500 errors on SEO Wizz, tried going through them and gave up after a couple of hours and only sorting 3 or 4.
In the next week I am moving SEO Wizz onto the Thesis theme on Wordpress, it’s one of the best I have come across in a while.
Watch this space
I’m glad blogger and wordpress are ranked pretty much equal in terms of SEO. However, I would have thought that google with give blogger a slight edge over wordpress, because after all, they are related.
@righteous,
In my experience the only difference is that blogger sends more referral traffic. I use both wordpress and blogger and have never noticed a difference in the time it takes to get ranked for certain keywords. I will say, however, that wordpress allows you to create a static home page which you can optimise for your keywords, with blogger your homepage content is always changing leaving your rankings somewhat erractic until you have solid link profile.
Tim,
I have had a blog up with blogger for two months with 0 traffic and analytics, when I know friends have come and used the site. W3c says there are over 400 errors. Is that why I get zero analytics? 2 months? What can I do? I thought it was the code errors. They are pretty much all html stuff. Why no traffic data? Would appreciate your experienced input. Do I stay? I have adsense on it, but no movement. I hesitate reaching out, ie., outsourcing with all of those errors.
Hi Audrey,
Don’t Panic. The W3c errors are nothing to do with your lack of traffic, all blogger blogs have them and it’s normally due to old outdated html attributes, don’t worry. The first thing I need you to do is apply Google analytics, visit http://www.google.com/analytics/ sign up for an account and paste the relevant tracking code just above your tag.
Go to you blogger panel, layout and edit html, expand all widgets and paste the code in.
Now you can really see whats hitting your blog without relying on adsense views. If Google adsense notices the same ip’s visiting over and over again it can actually stop showing them as impressions.
Anyway besides the above their are a few fundamental problems with your blog.
1 – You need to think about the keywords your targeting and have them in a title and sub title. Also think about the anchor text when you making links.
2 – You have no links so forget blog commenting, go out and write a few articles and publush them on ezine and go articles.
3 – Try to write your on your blog 3 times a week and link from your posts back to your homepage.
I would also highly recommend using Google webmaster tools, visit http://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/ and sign up for an account.
You will have to copy and paste a meta tag into the section of your blog. Once you do this confirm it on webmaster tools and submit a sitemap. The site map for your blogger would be http://florasfauna.blogspot.com/atom.xml.
If you do this there is no reason why you should not see at least some blogger referall traffic, you need to build more links to see search engine traffic. The main thing is don’t pay anyone to fix the errors because this has nothing to do with traffic.
without doubt wordpress as you have the option of the web based version or the more flexible server based, which can be seo optimized and customized.
I have seen google pick up a fresh domain on a wp blog within 3-days of launch.
@seo consultant,
I agree you with the whole flexibility of wordpress and the far superior technology, but I have seen Blogger blogs and WP blogs indexed equally as quick and seen results in the index to happen just as quick. One thing I would also add to the wordpress argument is that it gives a more professional feel and therefore allows you to grow your blog faster socially.
Great post, lots of useful info. was wondering, do you need your blog to be hosted on your own site(www.yourdomain.com/blog) or can a person become successful with a yourblog.blogspot.com site? I have heard that having your blog on blogspot(or other free blog) makes people think that your blog is newbie-ish and unprofessional,and really hurts the traffic and profits. Has any blog like that achieved success monetarily? What do you think?
@Iskander,
You can perform SEO successfully on a hosted or self hosted platform. I have seen many free blogs do very well in Google and make plenty of money from it. Just check out Griz’s Blog, ugly, free blogger template and sits at the top of Google for “make money” so you can imagine how much money is made from it, thousands every month.
On the other hand if your looking for a more professional platform you really do need to invest a little, you can make money online without it but if you want to brand yourself and make your site user friendly you need to invest. Thats my opinion anyway.
Very useful, I am thinking of starting a few blogs on blogspot and this is very helpful for someone who haven’t used blogspot until now.
Thanks a lot
Hi weeeeeeeee
No problem, thanks for dropping in and leaving a comment.
I am still so unsure about all these. You know, I had my blog hosted in blogger and in three months I did managed to obtain a PR4. I don’t use the default blogger template and instead use a wordpress template ported to blogger(you can find plenty of them for free anyway). And I own my own domain name, which I bought through blogger itself, so that, I didn’t had to do anything after buying the domain. No playing with DNS or anything.
Google indexed my new domain name in days and within a month all my pages were re indexed. So even after changing domain name after posting so many content and getting a PR3, I still managed to get back all my google juice and PR in 2 months or so. And my blog looks as “professional” as any wordpress blog and all I spend is a 10$/year for my domain name. Why should I even think about a new self hosted wordpress blog??Boy I am confused. Tim, can you help? Thanks
Hi Manuel,
First off let me say I don’t have any issues with blogger, I have a few blogger blogs with customised templates and a unique domain. The reason why I prefer wordpress is down to simple functionality, you can do whatever you want with, create a directory, individual pages, clever plugins and java functions. Self hosting is more expensive but at the same time it gives you far more control, for example how would redirect a deep page on blogger??
Blogger is a good starter platform and if you have managed to get some rankings I wouldn’t recommend changing, however I think wordpress allows you to take your skills and professionalism to the next level.
For me wordpress is the best plateform thank to all feature added by the community
i am using blogger for long time.and i think it is best.
I also used wordpress and i have also blog on it but the thing is i feel easy on blogger rather than wordpress
I prefer Blogger. Though I am using wordpress currently, my experience with blogger is they will get indexed faster and get more traffic.
Bandwidth is also not an issue with blogger. The only thing that blogger lack is the ability to put description per page and the url cannot be customize. Other things on blogger is more preferable compared to wordpress with the ever changing development.
please tell me about web master tool..?
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