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Issue 7 > Why your business blog shouldn't be on blogspot.

Why your business blog shouldn't be on blogspot.

Dharmesh Shah outlines the drawbacks of Google's blogging platform.

I recently moved a client's blog from Google's Blogger. In the process, I learned a lot.

I am now even further convinced that most businesses should not be using the 'yourcompany.blogspot.com' alternative for hosting a blog on Google. 'Top reasons why' include…

1 Google doesn't need the help. Let's assume you have a company website. (You do have a company website, don't you?) That website is probably on its own domain. (Example: yourcompany.com.)

By hosting your blog as a subdomain on blogspot.com, you're basically depriving your primary website of any real search engine optimization. Instead, if you're using blogspot.com, you're kind of benefiting Google instead.

Trust me, Google does not need your help to rank highly on its own search engine. Even if you don't switch blogging platforms, please do yourself a favor and get your own 'real' domain now. At least this way, if you decide to switch later, you won't lose all the search engine optimization (seo) that you've built up. (See the next point for more details.)

2 Domain lock-in. Savvy technical people will tell you that the right way to move a website or blog from one domain to another is via what is called a '301 permanent redirect'.

In lay person's terms, what this means is that you set up a clean forwarding address from your old site to the new site. By using this approach, you don't lose any of the search engine love you've pulled together.

Guess what: Google does not let you do a 301 redirect from your old site to anywhere else if you're using blogspot.com as your domain.

Let me repeat this. If you currently have a blog that is something like mybusiness.blogspot.com and you build a ton of inbound links to the site, Google does not let you redirect that seo value to a new site (like your company website).

This is a 'very bad thing'. Not enough for me to call Google evil, but enough for me to at least think it.

3 Transferring data is unreasonably hard. The client whose blog I moved from Blogger is a prolific writer. He had over 130 articles authored on there.

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