Hosting your own blog vs blogspot

Blogger blogs get spidered quicker, but don’t get ranked any higher.

There are some SEO things you could do

but although I’m not an expert,I feel you have missed the purpose and the power of the blog, which is the personal interaction and what you really need is to start actually interacting with other relevant blogs.

Using blogging methods such as trackback, comments, blogrolling, submitting your feeds, reading and reacting promptly to others’ feeds…being a little contentious, or amusing, or personal. Getting some multi way conversations going or at least sticking your nose in others’ well attended conversations.

If there arent many detective blogs about, find relevance in non PI blogs or add a personal, amusing (or even say a photoblogging) level to your own. . Enjoy yourself and forget about google, then watch the hits roll in..

(thats the theory anyway, one day i’ll try it myself)

splosh,
I never thought of that. These are all good ideas I never gave much thought. I do have all those blogging methods you mentioned turned on, but I’m not sure exactly how they work. I have “allow comments” enabled but the only comments I’ve gotten so far were a couple comment spams that I deleted. I did register my blog with techorati, etc.. but not sure about my feeds.

I should interact with other blogs. Crime blogs should be a good place to start. Where do I begin?

Thanks

NetDetective, I had been blogging on blogger before and my posts always where indexed quickly and appeared favourably in the results.

After installing WordPress, I imported my blogger postings and then say, within 10 mins, changed the WordPress blog URI. Within those ten minutes between importing and changing the URI (and placing a robots.txt) Google had indexed my imported posts (on the URI that existed for only about 10 mins after importing them) and they are listed entry for entry, with the same posting from my blogger blog.

Moral of the story, Blogger seems to have only a very marginal (ie insignificant in terms of minutes) impact on the speed of spidering posts and no apparent impact on the ranking of the posts.

Don’t worry so much about search engine stuff – worry about the quality of content. If you’re content is good, the search engines come to you!

Cheers,
Michael.

niziol,
With every new blogger you create, doesn’t it already put you in the Google system, since blogger is owned by Google?

I think the single biggest advantage of using blogger is probably ease of set up, especially where one wants to set up many multiple blogs.

Each WordPress blog requires it’s own domain that’s hosted somewhere. Multiple domain hosting is necessary to keep hosting expenses way down. If something goes wrong with the MySQL database such as file corruption, getting it working again can be a real problem.
Fred

For ease of use for a beginner, blogger is definetly easy to start with. But as to the original question in this thread, regarding any advantage to being listed on Google, there seems to be little, if any advantage.

I guess if I wanted to set up 20 different blogs to boost traffic and websales, setting up 20 different blogger accounts would be easier and faster than installing WP on 20 different domains.

What in the world would be the purpose of doing that? The only thing that would do is get you blacklisted by Google. There are enough spam laden “blogs” on the internet, we certainly don’t need anymore. All of these little ploys of yours to boost your traffic are going to have the opposite affect. People who are deceived into visiting a site aren’t likely to become customers. Search engines who are deceived are more than likely to blacklist you and make your on-line business life very miserable.

I think you’ve gone past the point of bordering on being a spammer, you’re now blatantly a want-to-be spammer trying to figure out how to do it without getting caught. But guess what, you’re done before you’ve even gotten started, because all of us know what this is all about and I strongly suspect Google and the other engines might not be quite as inept at some things as we think. If you’ve already been de-listed by Google once before, don’t you think that they’ll figure out this as well?

The answer is unequivocally yes! Don’t further damage the credibility of blogs by trying to pass of your blatant rubbish peddling as anything more than it really is – rubbish peddling!

I was only using ’20 blogs’ as an extreme example. I have no intention to create that many blogs or do blog any spamming. Please don’t get me wrong.

I recently ordered a copy of “Blogging to the bank” by Rob Benwell, bloggingtothebank.com.