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One of the most controversial practices in SEO wisdom is to use a blog service like Blogger for your blog. Most people in the industry advise against using third-party services to host blogs, especially for businesses. In a perfect world, that advice could be the best or the worst advice. In the real world, it’s just one more piece of flotsam on a sea of conflicting opinion. Here are some reasons for why you should use Blogger for SEO. Below those reasons you’ll find my tips.

Why should SEOs use blogger?

• So that you don’t look stupid when people ask for help specifically with blogger
• So that you can give informed comparisons when people ask for them
• So that you can see how Google favors some blog systems over others
• So that you can explain the benefits of using Blogger to people

The SEO industry looks unprofessional when people ask for help with their Blogger blogs and SEOs step up to the plate with such gleaming gems of wisdom as “Get a real blog!” Millions of people use Blogger for their personal blogs. Their reasons for doing so are legion, although most of them probably don’t know enough about the Web to feel comfortable using anything more sophisticated than Blogger. Treating people badly when they ask for help is sure to put you on most people’s DO NO BUSINESS WITH lists. Either give specific, helpful, detailed advice tailored to the level of knowledge of the person asking the question or don’t reply.

Any competent SEO technician should be able to provide at least basic help for Blogger users. Blogger is not rocket science. You don’t have to commit everything to memory. Just set up a Blogger blog, use it occasionally, and stay on top of how it works. Log in to refresh your memory before replying to someone’s plea for help.

You should be unbiased in your comparisons because on those occasions when people do ask for opinions about which service to use, they usually get rather useless advice like “I use Blog X! It’s great!” or “Don’t use Blog Y! It sucks!” Again, when SEOs don’t tailor their advice to the level of knowledge of the person asking the question, the SEOs don’t fool anyone. Showing how incompetent you can be as source of professional help isn’t going to win you many customers.

If you cannot already provide a concise, informative comparison of 2-3 blog services then you should make that a project you complete within the next month. Don’t just look at the terms of service and features pages — set up some blogs and use them. Understand what is good for an inexperience user and what is helpful for an advanced user.

You cannot possibly know in advance which blog service will be best for another person. You may be able to help them understand the complex documentation that all blogs inevitably accrue. Don’t limit your knowledge to just the basic services. Build a library of tips and tools for each service.

Google does inherently favor some blog services for reasons I cannot explain. How do I know this? I know this because I maintain multiple blogs on multiple blog services. Blogger blogs have advantages over other blog services’ blogs. But those advantages are offset by disadvantages, too. Nonetheless, if you don’t know how having a Blogger blog works better with Google in some ways than using other blogs, your SEO knowledge is weak in this area.

Sometimes it really is best to suggest people use blogger because, frankly, Blogger is sometimes the best solution. You need to know when that is true and why.

Why should anyone use Blogger?

This is the easiest question to answer. Blogger is a fast, easy-to-set-up service that is tied in with Google AdSense and other services Google offers. Google has done a decent job of integrating some of its technologies across the platform. So for people who want to use fairly sophisticated blog tools without having to figure out how to make everything work together, Blogger offers a fairly stream-lined plug-n-play interface. (Wordpress, for example, won’t allow you to embed Javascript on its hosted blogs.)

Most bloggers do not host their own Web sites. Why? I don’t know and frankly you don’t need to care. When someone asks for advice on how to set up a blog, the first words out of your mouth should be, “How comfortable are you with Web hosting technology?” Many SEOs fumble the ball and say, “Use Wordpress!”

Now, Wordpress.com is a great site (I use it) for third-party blog hosting but before you recommend Wordpress.com, ask if the user wants to integrate Google tools and technologies. If they answer “Yes” and if they are not comfortable with Web hosting technology, you should not need to wait for that truck to knock you into next week to figure out that this is a prime candidate for Blogger.

Some spammers love Blogger, btw. They set up blog farms with it. Of course, Blogger has struck back by testing blogs to see if they are human-controlled. There is a neat little trick Blogger has been using for several years that occasionally frustrates legitimate users. I’ve found references to it going back at least as far as 2006 (that may be the year when Google implemented it). Basically, you set up a blog, start posting to it, and after a few days, maybe a couple of weeks you log in and find a message that blatantly and falsely accuses you of being a spammer. It demands that you click on a button within 30 days or your blog will be deleted.

I used Blogger for several years before that happened to me. When I researched the test I found that every person who complained about it was still blogging several years later. They all clicked on the button. So I clicked on the button and the problem went away.

Does this filter out all the spammers? Probably not. Supposedly a human reviewer looks at the blog after you click on the button but I don’t know. In any event, new bloggers should be reassured that Blogger is trying to keep the service useful because it does send traffic to random blogs. That is one of the most useful features of Blogger — its built-in Webring service lets you click from blog to blog without having to search for stuff. People occasionally find blogs they bookmark for future reference.

How To Use Blogger For SEO

Make sure the blog pings – This is the Number One (1) Reason why anyone should use Blogger. After a few posts your blog will usually start showing up in Google Blogsearch. There are many well-established, aged blogs that don’t appear in Google Blogsearch. Why? I have no idea. But I see Blogger blog after Blogger blog move quickly into Blogsearch. Blogsearch is a good bellwether tool for SEO to see how well a blog is performing. If I cannot get a blog into Google’s picky Blogsearch, I feel like the blog lacks something.

Of course, many Blogger blogs fail to appear in Google Blogsearch. There are, I am sure, many reasons for that. Nonetheless, using multiple blogs on multiple platforms in exactly the same way, I have consistently watched the Blogger blogs move into Google Blogsearch faster than all the others. The only way I have found to get a blog in as quickly or faster is to link to it from many other blogs that are already indexed regularly in Google Blogsearch.

If a blog appears in Blogsearch it should get into Google Websearch, but that isn’t always the case. So another good bellwether test for a blog’s health is to see if it appears in BOTH Websearch and Blogsearch. If it does, you’re probably on the right track.

Pinging, of course, can get your Blogger blog into other services as well, so that needs to be said.

Use recap posts – One of the disadvantages of Blogger is that Google automatically sets the robots.txt file to block indexing of all /search results. That is the subdirectory where your labels go. So using labels on Blogger is almost pointless, although some people have developed clever ways to create categories on Blogger. Those categories won’t be crawled and indexed but they will help your users.

Still, many people are not comfortable digging into HTML so it is a good idea to write a monthly recap post that links back to your older articles. Danny Sullivan has provided the best examples of how to do this with his regular recaps on SearchEngineWatch and SearchEngineLand (I’m not sure SEW has kept up the practice with their new design). Barry Schwartz also provides frequent recaps on Search Engine Roundtable. Recapping your posts helps get them recrawled and keep them in the index.

Linking back to older posts is also helpful. It’s not well known but many Wordpress.com cross-links within their network are nofollowed. You don’t have to worry about that (yet) with Blogger.

Use Blogger to link to your primary site – I’m not talking about spamming the index with fifty reposts of your front page. Let’s say you have 50 pages of content on your site. You should be able, over time, to write 50 articles on your Blogger blog that link to relevant pages on your site. The Wordpress.com terms of services discourage this practice. Blogger’s do not. But you should also link out to other content as well, thus making your blog a useful resource.

Being able to get a Blogger blog indexed quickly and thoroughly offers you a linking resource that is generally safe to use. Just understand that Blogger is being watched closely for abuse. It’s not offering open invitations to create crawl pages.

Use Blogger to test expressions – Some queries are more competitive than others. Relying on your link research to determine which queries are competitive is a bad idea. If you can use an active, eclectic Blogger site to get an article into the top 20 or 30 search results for a query without investing in a lot of links, the odds are pretty good that you don’t have to go into hyperoptimization overkill to participate in that query. And it gives you a place for a relevant link.

Conclusion, Recap, and Winding Up (or Down)

Even search engine optimization gurus can learn something from using Blogger. It is by no means the best blogging platform around but it is still useful, popular, and well worth understanding. SEO arrogance has relegated Blogger mostly to the unwashed masses and Web spammers. The so-called black hat spammers may not be getting as much benefit from Blogger now as they used to, but remember that most of what the black hats do is exactly the same thing as what the white hats do — the black hats just take the good stuff to excess.

You don’t need to create blog farms populated by autogenerated mush and rehashed RSS feeds to get some good SEO benefit out of Blogger. Nor do you need to act like a snob and try to proselytize for your favorite platform when people ask for help or advice about Blogger. Either step up to the plate and show people you’re a professional who knows how to deal with the platform or shut up, step aside, and let a REAL SEO do some work.