I am thinking of doing a blog. What is the best way to get a blog ranked well fast do you think? Just put one up on blogger.com or get my own webhost and put a wordpress blog on there? or something different? I have great content for the blog already so I want to get something indexed and getting some hits quick. thanks
Not sure about in the short time, but in long term it's always beneficial to blog on your own domain.
jgjg, I am a blogger user. Its very simple and mainly free to use. The best part is you dont have to worry about server cost and even server crashed or bandwidth usage. Wordpress is the best CMS, easy to use and lot of stuff you can do with it. Blogger lacks when it comes to modifying your themes etc. Very limited options to play around. If your blog is not too old, i suggest you go for FTP publishing option with custom domain. This way you will retain the PR and backlinks. Else you are stuck like me. My blog rapidly became popular and till the time i realized it i was stuck with blogger. My blog is now Pr 6 with over 3000 subscribers and thousands of backlinks. Its too late for me to make a switch
Are you wanting to enter into an seo competition? If not I'd suggest that you use wordpress.org on your own domain. Although good seo competitions should prevent usage of blogger
I do not see any major differences in ranking different blog platforms atm. Search engines will still rank the blogs like other pages irregardless of the hosting environment
thanks guys. I am now 99% sure it is best to use my own domain. my only thought was that with a blogger.com hosted site could be quicker to get indexed and might get a little preferential treatment from google, but wouldn't be worth it if I built the blog into an asset.
Don't get to mad about SEO, there may be a little difference between blogger and hosted wordpress for search engine but in the long run the only thing that will make the difference is the quality of your blog. If you have the skill to install Wordpress go for your own domain
I believe Blogger now allows you to do a 301 redirect with the new Blogger format. Here's an article on the subject - Blogger Custom Domain. Regards, Robert
Use your own domain. If you use blogger, I think they use a subdomain, which is not very nifty for SEO, and the alexa cannot be determined because it will determine blogger.com's alexa not yours (since your on a subdomain).
If you use 'new blogger', the PR will go to your .blogspot.com subdomian, Even though you can link to it from a unique domain name, your domain name will not get the PR and will not show up in SERPS. Blogger gets crawled and entered into google blogsearch immediately, that's a small short-term advantage. Wordpress with various plugins and apache config, however, could provide a more SEO friendly infrastructure (including keywords in page urls, url canonization etc). So for the long run, WP+your domain+some WP plugins and server config.