It's almost like I get a temporary boost in the SERPS. If you check out my blog I threw in an experiment to see how long it would take to get a couple fake keywords listed in SERPS. I took "gdiggler" and "googl3" and referenced each word to gdiggler.thinkbling.com and googl3.thinkbling.com respectively. Within a day or two the subdomains not only where cached but showing up in search results. "gdiggler" was the only one in the SERPS but "googl3" was returning a couple hundred results and was at about 5 for the past couple days. It has since dropped down to just the top 30. My blog blogger.thinkbling.com however is at the top of a search for "googl3". Kind of odd because everytime I mention googl3 it is a link to the subdomain. This experiment wasn't "Scientific" in its approach but I think we can learn some stuff about blogs from it. Perhaps another blog test could be organized for a specific page that has no or very low results. Personally I would like to try at least 10 different blogs and have them point the keyword bling to www.thinkbling.com, but that's just me trying to get free links
I think blogger.com can do all of those. Mybe not the XML one though. You'd have to look in the settings.
I use Blogger.com. It has excellent tools. All that you have to do is sign up and configure it to use an ftp account on your server/host. After you have the FTP stuff setup correctly, you just go to Blogger, sign in, create a new post and click the publish button.
Hi thanks for the replies on why blogs are potentially favoured by Google. I will await the answers to the previous post about recommended Blogs.
I updated my little blog a couple of times a weeks initially, in it's first few months in obtained a 3/10PR. This lasted for around another 3 months or so, before it dropped back to 0/10. A few years on it still has 0/10. Mind you I probably only update it once a month 'tops' now. Still it provides a back link to my 'main site' & I enjoy it too.