The Real Blogger Status

Some blog owners delete or rename a blog, without proper planning - and later regret their action. Some spammers track blog name availability - particularly with blog names that contain "English" (and some non English) language words. If a spammer discovers that a given blog name has recently become available, he will publish a stub blog to that name - and later, add spammy content. Why is a spammer interested in recently available names?

Some blog owners, needing to take large amounts of post content offline, unsuccessfully try to use the Posts menu to "Revert to draft" posts, in quantity. Selecting all posts displayed, they click on "Revert to draft", and are given the bad news. You cannot modify more than 50 entries at once. This is annoying - but does not have to be terminal, to whatever project was underway.

Occasionally, we see the question My domain is expiring soon. Will the blog be visible, after the domain expires? And this answer is not so obvious. If the blog remains "published" to the domain, the blog will redirect to a dead domain. Your readers may see a screen full of ads - or they may see Site not found. What they see will depend upon ISP / registrar policy.

Abuse / Malware / Spam classification of Blogger blogs - and the inevitable bogus fuzzy classification - has been a part of Blogger life, for several years. Recently, we explored known effects of bogus classification, upon reader and search engine reputation. It's not a pretty picture - but it's also not likely to go away, as long as abusive persons, such as spammers , operate in the Internet world. Owners of blogs spuriously classified are not likely to be very objective - but we cannot avoid reality.

We see this question, in Blogger Help Forum: How Do I? , a couple times / year. Can I keep using a Classic template on my blog - or must I upgrade? Right now, Blogger won't require anybody to upgrade. You can stay with a Classic template, if you want. That said, there is no guarantee that the next major Blogger problem will not leave Blogger Engineering deciding to cut their losses, and move forward. If we can get Blogger back online with Layout and better today - as opposed to Classic templates, next week - let's drop Classic templates, and bring it back, today. They've moved forward, this way, in the past - and next week, they could, again. Eventually, this will happen. One day, Blogger will come back online - but without your blog.

One of the saddest answers given in Blogger Help Forum: Something Is Broken starts with the naive query My domain registration expired last month, and my blog is now offline. How do I redirect the domain back to the blog? The answer here is simple, and does not provide a lot of promise , to the blog owner. If possible, you may be able to publish the blog back to BlogSpot - but the blog will have to be re indexed from the beginning. Once the domain registration expires, you cannot use the domain address for reputation or traffic source. Any search engine hit entries, to the domain URL, will be 404 - and there is nothing that you can do, if you no longer own the domain .

Your blog depends upon traffic for its success. Anything that affects the traffic to your blog, such as a change in the URL, affects the success of your blog. If you republish your blog to a different BlogSpot URL, as with migration to a custom domain , you will not lose any content. Both comments, posts, the template, and all custom settings, will stay with the blog. And if you plan the republishing effort, you can minimise the loss of traffic.

Your blog depends upon traffic for its success. Anything that affects the traffic to your blog, such as any change in the URL , affects the success of your blog. Publishing the blog to a custom domain, like renaming the blog , will affect traffic to your blog . The effects of the change will vary from blog to blog, because of the different traffic to every different blog. Followers . People who find your blog because of recommendations by other people. Search engines . Robotic processes which methodically surf your blog, and provide dynamic indexing to people who search for information. Subscribers . People who read your content from their newsfeed reader, such as the dashboard Reading List. Viewers . People who read your content from their browser. No two blogs are the same - and no two blogs will have the same combinations of traffic sources .

Just like publishing a BlogSpot blog, sometimes we change our mind about the URL to use for a custom domain published blog. Just like changing a BlogSpot URL, changing a custom domain URL should include some careful planning . First, never start this process without all domains involved being properly setup in DNS .

When you setup a custom domain properly, and publish a blog to a non-BlogSpot URL, the BlogSpot URL remains active . With the BlogSpot address active, you can move forward to the new address, without worrying about loss of readership, or search engines indexing problems. Both the old (BlogSpot) and new (custom domain) addresses will work, for eternity. This feature, in my opinion, is one of the ideas which exemplifies the reputation of Google, for innovative design. If you decide to move back, and publish to BlogSpot, this may not be such an easy task.

One of the neatest features of Blogger "One Button Publishing" is the "one button" design. Don't like the layout of the blog? Change the template! Don't like the colour of the background (the post area, the sidebar, ...)? Change the colour! Don't like the Title, don't like the URL, ... Whoa. Slow down. The URL, that is the Universal Resource Locator, is known all over the Internet. Or should be, if you're publicising the blog properly . That's your public name - don't be changing that on the spur of the moment.

If you create a blog, and work on it, eventually it will rise in value. Given enough work, and reader interest, it may even get a Google Page Rank of some decent value. Let's say you manage to make something of your blog, then tire of it. The normal thing would be to delete it . Delete it - it's gone - move on to something new. Simple, right? At one time, you could have just deleted your blog, using the dashboard Settings - Other - "Delete blog" wizard, in "Blog Tools", without thinking.