Blogger

The term blogger has two meanings. It can be used to refer to the free blog-hosting platform from Google, blogger.com, or to a person operating his/her own blog.

Blogger (person)

Bloggers are people who operate a blog and regularly publish “posts” on them either for private or commercial reasons. Posts from bloggers are usually characterized by the fact that they often reflect subjective perspectives. This subjectivity can either be related to a person, group, or even an entire brand or corporate identity. A blogger can also be referred to as a Linkerati if they are able to reach a large audience with their posts due to their personality or position.

Topics

As for the topics, bloggers are not limited. There is no topic on which they cannot blog. It is for this reason that we have fashion bloggers, car bloggers, political bloggers, etc. Some bloggers also form community blogs where several editors write about a common topic.

Private vs. commercial

The number of bloggers who live in Germany cannot be estimated accurately. It is said that more than 100,000 people blog regularly. However, as depicted by the ARD/ZDF online study from 2013, the number of blogs has decreased. One reason for this trend is that less blogs are integrated in the social web in Germany as opposed to Anglo-Saxon countries or the US. There, many bloggers can actually live off their blogs.

SEO bloggers

Blogging is particularly popular in the SEO field, since blogs present an important source of information for industry professionals. Popular SEO blogs include the Mediadonis Blog or the SEO Book. Examples of blogs in the Anglo-Saxon countries include the Moz Blog or the Matt Cutts Blog.

Blogger.com (blog system)

Blogger is one of the services offered by the Google Group. Users can use a Google account to register on Blogger.com and run their own blog. Blogger.com is characterized by a simple, free blog CMS, where bloggers do not need to have HTML skills or rent web space.

History

The Blogger blog hosting service was created in 1999 by Pyra Labs. Since 2003, Blogger has been owned by Google. A year later, the functions of the Picasa image editing program and the Hello Program were integrated in those of Blogger. Since then, users of the Blogger system have been able to easily integrate photos in their posts.

In 2004, the design and functionality of blogger.com was improved. Similar to WordPress, uploading posts via email was now possible.

Since 2006, all blogs created with a Google account are only stored on Google Inc.’s servers. Additional features were introduced that same year. These included the possibility to add new designs through drag and drop as well as the RSS feeds.

Advantages and disadvantages of the Blogger blog hosting system

Anyone who starts a blog with Blogger.com has many advantages. These are listed below:

• free hosting
• easy to create a blog
• simple, almost intuitive handling with a single Google account
• possibility of blogging with multiple users
• simple monetization through easy integration of Google AdSense
• easy to post using the Google Toolbar
• fast set up and uploading of contents using Microsoft Windows

The disadvantages are:

• often monotonous design
• few customization options compared to other blog systems
• IP must be shared with many other blogs

Basically, the user is free to redirect the contents of Blogger to their own domain. Blogs created using blogger have the following address form:

examplename.blogspot.com

Blogger as a blog system and SEO

The massive setting of backlinks using bogs has long been an effective means of SEO in order to improve the link popularity. Blogger quickly became popular due to its services that enable fast and easy set up of free blogs. However, SEO and the algorithms of search engines have changed with time, and massive link building on Blogger.com is not advisable.

Anyone who still wishes to use the blog hosting system for SEO purposes can regard Blogger.com as an additional portal to transport contents that are accessed by others. Through Blogger’s excellent integration of blog contents in the Google search engine index, the content becomes very easy to access. This can be very advantageous if one wishes to us a .blogspot.com address in order to reach out to a larger audience. Nonetheless, the same SEO rules for web projects also apply for indexing.