The Real Blogger Status

Some blog owners setup a new blog - and want to know if the blog title and URL may - or (alternately) should - be the same. There is no policy for Blogger, about blog title and URL - either that the "words" in each can, or cannot, be the same. Some SEO experts suggest benefits from having relevant words, in the URL - and some blog owners confuse this advice, as suggesting having identical titles and URLs. Be wary of advice that references websites, in discussions about blogs. There are subtle, but real, differences between dynamic blogs, and static websites . Rules that may be important for websites may not be relevant, for blogs.

One hot Internet topic, these days, involves specialised ("vanity") domains. The hot names seem to change, by the week. This week, enom is hyping ".family", ".live", ".rocks", and ".social" . Other registrars may have other recommendations. The blog Address (Name) is a key blog identity element , in a well designed blog. It's visible both to people, and to search engine crawlers. The requirement that addresses must be unique is a supposed benefit of vanity top level domains - but vanity TLDs, alone, will not provide blog uniqueness. There will always be competition for some names, in any useful Top Level Domain.

Some blog owners setup a blog - then a social media account or two - and immediately, start advertising each new blog post in social media. Later checking Google and other search engines, they find that the blog is now indexed - but the index entries point through the FaceBook, Google+, and / or Twitter posts. The blog, under "blogspot.com", is nowhere to be found, in any SERP entry . Not everybody realises that Blogger promises anonymity , when properly setup - and that anonymity comes with a price .

Besides optimizing post content , to make the blog easier to read and encourage readers to remain. you have a similar task in optimizing the blog structure. The posts content is what people read, when they are in the blog. The blog structure is what you similarly need to optimize, to get people into the blog.

Too many blog owners start a blog, then post in AdSense Help Forum: Blogger, YouTube, Partner sites , or maybe in Blogger Help Forum: Learn More About Blogger , a bit of naivete. What is required, to be eligible for AdSense? And someone who has to ask is probably wasting time asking.

Along with consistently using Jump Break, properly sizing and wording of important post sections can make the blog pages neater, and easier to read. You see my opening paragraph, above. Sizing and wording of important post sections, such as the opening paragraph, helps make the main page layout more consistent - and gives a slightly more professional look to the blog. And, a cleaner and more consistent page layout, to complement a carefully structured blog , encourages readers to read more of the blog.

Some blog owners use Blogger, as a lightweight website platform. A normal Blogger blog consists of posts, which are published as dynamic pages. Static pages, used in a normal blog, are extra content - that's typically hidden from direct view, and intentionally not indexed by the search engines . A website, on the other hand, will typically use static pages as content. Static pages, by default, are not used as blog content.

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.

With a static website, you use different sized headers to indicate sections of each page - and how important each section may be. That helps your readers search each page, and makes them happy - and making your readers happy increases SEO. With a Blogger blog, what makes your readers happy increases SEO, also. With a blog, you make your readers happy by providing content, for them to read . And you make them happier, by organising the content.

Some blog owners want to have the titles of the posts easier to spot, in search hit lists. The solution, to them, is to have the post titles appear before the blog titles, in the template header. If you want your blog to have the post title in front of the blog title, this is a simple enough change. It's best to make this change only affect display of individual pages (when indexed), and posts . Other search hit list entries, such as archive, label, and main page displays, should show the default blog page title - and not confuse the potential readers with irrelevant detail, in the search hit list entries.

Drop down menus, and custom sitemaps, are tools used in static websites, to help the readers find website content. Occasionally, in Blogger Help Forum: Learn More About Blogger , we see a question from blog owners, who are accustomed to publishing static websites. How do I upload a custom sitemap, for my readers to use? or How do I build a drop down, cascaded menu bar, to index the posts? The answer, for Blogger blogs, is that neither is truly useful. Features like cascaded, drop down menus, custom sitemaps, numbered pages, and complex slideshows ("sliders"), are excellent accessories, for static websites. Blogger blogs, however, are dynamic - and don't really benefit from either accessory.

We see a few spam blogs, in Blogger Help Forum: Get Help with an Issue , that are classified for having scraped content . Some nervous blog owners, who routinely copy content as part of their blog posts, want to know if their blogs are vulnerable to "scraped content" spam classifications . I suspect that there are several issues to consider, regarding use of copied content in your blog .

Some blog owners want to emphasise the nature of the blog content, to the search engines. Given a properly developed blog , you can add meta tags, on a per blog, per page, and per post basis. The tags can indicate, to your prospective readers, what the blog - and each page and post - is about.

From time to time, we see questions about using a Blogger / Google custom domain, with publishing services outside Blogger / Google. Some Blogger blog owners want to combine their Blogger blogs, with non Blogger blogs and websites - and others want simply to move their blogging activity to non Blogger services. And a few think ahead, and wonder how adding or moving to another service will affect the ability of their existing readers to find their blog, and / or their ability to get new readers. As with using a Blogger blog with an existing non Google domain , this is not a simple project - and to do this properly will require research - and well informed decisions. Some assistance can be provided by Blogger or in Blogger Help Forum: Learn More About Blogger - and other portions of the project will require advice or instruction from the support groups for the new service.

One of the more intriguing questions, that we see in Blogger Help Forum: Learn More About Blogger , involves the Blogger / WordPress dichotomy . Should I migrate my blog to WordPress, where they provide SEO optimized themes, and various plugins? My answer to that question starts with the suggestion, that the blog owner should ask himself Why do I publish a blog? This question has many possible answers - but I will focus on two possibilities.

Too many blog owners start their first blog - and the first step is to drop into the nearest online publishing forum - such as Blogger Help Forum: Learn More About Blogger , and ask the question of the typical marketing expert. I want to start a blog. What should I write about, to make the most money? And there is where many spam blogs start. People who are making money, are busy making money. They do not hang out in forums, waiting for you to ask how to make money, so they can tell you how to make money - probably, some of the money that they want to be making.

Some new blog owners spend time examining the various settings provided by Blogger, in the dashboard. Some dashboard settings inspire questions, in Blogger Help Forum: Learn More about Blogger . As helpers there, we know from experience that some questions, asked and answered there, will lead to later questions in Blogger Help Forum: Get Help with an Issue . The "Robots.Txt" file is one feature which inspires these types of questions. I was updating my settings on Blogger, and I discovered some settings that I didn't understand. What do I add for "Custom robot text" and "Custom robot header tag"? When I was young, my mother used to provide advice "That is a well enough!" - as the proper answer, to this question, is to "Leave well enough alone!".

People who publish blogs which are relevant to a specific country may be able to focus search engine attention, for their blog - and better target readers in the country in question. Google Webmaster Tools provides the "Geographical target" setting, which lets a blog owner select a single country. The setting increases search engine attention, for their blog, in the country selected.

I've been studying spam, in Blogger blogs, for over 5 years . This year, we've seen improvement in the automated spam classification process, implied by a noticeable reduction in spam review requests overall - and in a reduction of false positive classifications . During the past few months, blogs requested for review are 2 or 3 times more likely to be confirmed as legitimate spam blogs (true positives), compared to this time last year.

We see many questions in Blogger Help Forum: Something Is Broken , about blog content, and (lack of) appreciation by the readers. Occasionally, people become concerned about activity of the people reading their blogs - why they get so many new visitors (but nobody returns later, to read more), or why the main page is so well read (but nobody reads the archived posts). In other cases, they wonder why the blog was deleted - even though it had the required warning protecting it - or maybe why the content warning is there . And sometimes, they may wonder why so many people read the blog, but nobody comments on the posts.