For years I have been reading absurd suggestions that Google’s Blogger / Blogspot service is SEO friendly. At one time this was semi-true, and it is even possible with the current incarnation. However if you use the service “as intended”, without expert knowledge, you might find yourself up a creek without a paddle.

I am writing this on a Sunday, thus I am going to avoid vulgarities, cussing, and even an attention grabbing headline. The Google engineers at Blogger deserve that and more. Blogspot currently stinks for SEO.

Google Webmaster Guidelines Mess Up

This is probably the root cause of the Blogger problems

Use robots.txt to prevent crawling of search results pages or other auto-generated pages that don’t add much value for users coming from search engines.

Blogspot Doesn’t Have Categories

There was a historical lacking feature in Blogspot, no categories, and users wanted them.

So Blogger introduced labels, but they unfortunately followed the advice from their own Webmaster Guidelines, such as this example from Blogger’s own Blogger Buzz blog.

User-agent: Mediapartners-Google
Disallow: 

User-agent: *
Disallow: /search

Sitemap: http://buzz.blogger.com/feeds/posts/default?orderby=updated

That causes label pages such as this one on the Google Webmaster blog not to be crawled

http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/search/label/webmaster%20tools

The links to those tag pages don’t have nofollow, but Google can’t crawl them to read what is on the page, but pages blocked using robots.txt still accumulate PageRank.

Blogger blocks labels with Robots.txt

That creates “hanging or dangling pages” and the PageRank gets shared out between all the pages in the internet

There are easy solutions to this:-

Best solution

• Have excerpts on the label pages
• Possibly noindex the label pages with either meta noindex or robots.txt noindex
• Add nofollow to all external links on the label pages, both in the content and sidebar

Stop-gap solution

• Nofollow label links from content – they still wouldn’t give any deep indexing benefit, but at least they wouldn’t throw PageRank away.

Note: Those solutions are for blogger developers to implement instead of using robots.txt disallow, not for Blogger users. Sorry Blogger users, you have been at a significant disadvantage for years unless you can find a smart (viable) alternative to creating categories by hand.

Blogspot Indexing Problems

With labels being blocked by robots.txt, some but not all Blogspot blogs have major indexing problems.

As an example, it doesn’t seem like Google passes any juice through the dropdown menus used on the Webmaster Central blog.

Dropdown Menus On Blogspot Could Cause Indexing Problems

Of couse not every Blogspot publisher displays date based archives, and even the traditional “older posts / newer posts” navigation ends up being blocked by the robots.txt file.

As an example this link from Rick Klau’s blog (A Blogger Product Manager)

http://tins.rklau.com/search?updated-max=2009-05-04T11%3A53%3A00-07%3A00&max-results=7

You can see by the lack of snippet and cache that this is blocked by robots.txt

Blogger Older Posts Navigation Blocked With Robots.txt

Fortunately for Rick he doesn’t allow his labels and pagination links to be the only method for Google to crawl his content, plus he has a huge amount of “Google Juice” to play with.

This is actually the best navigation implementation I have seen on any Blogspot blog, as it has allowed all his content to be indexed, or certainly the vast majority.

Blogger Navigation That Works

This is still “ball linking” rather than a structured appraoch, but for Blogspot it is about all you could hope to achieve.

By having this massive navigation on every page, effectively turning every page into a sitemap, there are so many link on page that a few external or internal label links don’t really matter.

This isn’t the case with the majority of Blogger blogs, and blocking with robots.txt is an abomination.

At the same time Rick has been trying to persuade people to stop using the old, unreliable Blogspot system which allowed you to publish to your own domain, suggesting that there are no problems.

How Hard Is It To Leave Blogger?

Whilst people talk about it being easy to leave Blogger to another platform, the importer has been bugged for a long time – Blogger strips stopwords from generated URLs, WordPress doesn’t.

Then there is only what I would term a “Interstitial Defamation Wall”

Redirects from Blogspot to a custom domain now hosted externally get slapped with an interstitial warning.

See for yourself http://niche-website.blogspot.com

I had already left Blogspot before Google decided to finally provide custom domain support. I had set up a complicated script with meta redirects, and I even regained my rankings and wrote about it.

When custom domains became available, I decided that it would be best to assign andybeard.eu to my blogspot account, and then point it at WordPress so that visitors and search spiders saw an immediate 301 redirect.

Google when you set this up are very reassuring

Blogger Custom Domain Setup

It seems this is only true if you stay with Blogger forever. I should also point out that during my testing I discovered that I could no longer assign andybeard.eu, and I was forced to use www.andybeard.eu

Links & Rankings

The main thing that ties any Blogger to using Blogspot are incoming links and rankings. When I moved I probably had 24,000 links to my old Blogspot, depending on which reporting you believed.

Even a couple of weeks ago Yahoo was reporting ~10K , though it seemed a lot less today. Google in Webmaster tools only reports 100 or so, though they may have removed loads due to the redirects.

I don’t care that much, building up links takes time but isn’t something that can’t be fairly easily replaced over time, at least for me.

However for any potential blogging service provider (and honestly anyone running WordPress might soon be able to offer blog hosting within 3-6 months if WordPress core merges with WPMU) this is a serious barrier to overcome.

If you use Blogspot, but with a custom domain from the beginning, this isn’t a problem, but for everyone else, it might be a deciding factor to stay.

I could switch back to the delayed meta refresh method, but I can’t see why I should have to – Google should never have inserted such a message between me and my visitors.

I am looking to clean up some old articles because there is too much SEO junk on the web, but deciding how to handle my old “How to move from Blogspot to WordPress” articles are a major problem.

• I am adamant that people really should still leave Blogger for their own good, if they value their online business
• I am not in a position to advise on best practice, and the most suitable method is messed up.

As far as I am concerned this interstitial isn’t passing any juice through to Andybeard.eu, though there is a YES/No link, but it uses onclick, but returns false, but the URL is not constructed… ask Sebastian if you want a definitive answer.

From the Bidvertiser Blog

To address this, we have now launched 3 unique solutions:

1. WordPress Plugin to allow you to seamlessly embed the BidVertiser Ads in your feeds. You can download the plugin from your publisher account.

2. Solution for FeedBurner that allows you to embed the BidVertiser Ads in your current FeedBurner address. Click here to learn more about the FeedBurner solution.

3. Solution for Blogger/Blogspot that allows you to embed the BidVertiser Ads in the footer of each of your post feeds. Click here to learn more about the Blogger solution.

This now makes Bidvertiser feed advertising a much more viable solution

Install Greasemonkey

Lots of people might have it already and I know 65% of my readers use Firefox. If you don’t have it already, it is extremely useful, and there are thousands of user scripts for it.

Install Blogger Trackback

After you have Greasemonkey installed, install the appropriate script – the developer says both can co-exist, but I haven’t tested that.

If you are using New Blogger, you can use this trackback script for greasemonkey.

If you are using old blogger, there is an older script available

Trackback In Blogger

I think the picture near enough says it all

Yes that is a box within the Blogger interface where you just add a trackback URL.

After you publish, you even get a nice confirmation that it was sent

Del.icio.us

The script also pops up a window for your Delicious details, and tags your posts.

Pingoat & Pingomatic

Yep, it is meant to work with Pingoat and Pingomatic as well, though when I tested with Pingoat following the instructions, I didn’t see any additional visual confirmation. I didn’t test Pingomatic.

I am not 100% sure this part worked for me, I need to do some more testing

Good But No Banana… yet!

It isn’t a perfect solution as is, because it is using the blog name for the link URL on the receiving end, rather than the blog post title.
It should be possible to hack the Greasemonkey script to use your post title, so that it uses the post title for links on the receiving end.

I will see what I can do to get a modified version made available

In this first part of this quick series, I am going to cover Haloscan.

Create A Haloscan Account

First of all you need to register with Haloscan.

You do not need to integrate Haloscan with your blog to use their trackback system

I would actually currently advise you not to integrate Haloscan for comments and trackback display on your blog for a number of reasons.

• Blogger can now display linkbacks
• You can remove nofollow from the trackback links on blogger
• It is harder to migrate to WordPress or other blogging platform if all your comments are in Haloscan.

Send Trackback With Haloscan

It is important that links actually exist, and in this particular case when this post is published a link will exist, otherwise comment spam plugins might intercept the trackback.

There is also what I would look on as a bug with Haloscan, they use the blog title as the link for the trackback, and not the post name. The blog post title appears in bold above the trackback. Knowing this you can make sure you have some keywords for a good link by including them in the blog title rather than the post title, though the text entry field is quite small.

This is how a trackback appears on my blog below the comments box.

So if you are using Blogger, or a blogging platform that doesn’t seem to send trackbacks correctly, Haloscan is one option you can use to send a trackback.

When I checked on Wednesday due to timezones it hadn’t been published yet, Thursday I was so buried in code, themes and plugins I didn’t spot it being published (yes I need more vanity Google Alerts), and so I am linking through to it today.

One thing it definitely highlights is the advantage of real genuine trackbacks over Technorati.
Technorati shows I have gained 4000 links in the last 3 months, and the number is escalating, mainly as Technorati find more and more additional feeds and blogroll links.

Google need to provide a decent trackback function with Blogger. You can use a 3rd party such as Haloscan, but that is very inconvenient. Maybe someone needs to create a service “I will ping your blogger” which subscribes to a blogspot feed, and sends feed notifications.
If you use Blogger and have found a good solution to trackbacks, please share that information in the comments.

So anyway, one thing I really like about Marty is that each interview he conducts asks different questions to prior interviews. It is not like he is using a template and sending it to 20 bloggers to create the content for a month.

Did I reveal any secrets? Possibly, Marty asked me questions I had never thought about in the past – the answers will certainly tell you a little more about me.

Nofollow On Blogspot

I try to keep many of my posts updated as often as possible, and I believe that Ronnie’s guide on Tips for Blogspot is currently the easiest to understand.

Remove Nofollow From Blogger Comments & Trackbacks

Ronnie also seems to be extremely experienced with Blogspot, and is doing a lot of things I honestly never thought about doing, or even though was possible.

He has written a much more technical guide for those publishing using blogger on their own servers.

Processing Blogger Pages As PHP Using FTP

The example he uses is for parsing comments to remove link attributes such as nofollow.

So you can now share link love to your commenters on Blogger

2000-2000=0

If everyone grabs all the images and sticks it on a page on their site, it is effectively like a link exchange directory which people have been doing for years. Google can certain filter links like that out with no problem.

Obviously it is not quite so simplistic, and it should be noted that there is a level of editorial in this. It is real blogs created by real people, and Tino visits the sites to check.

It is also important that these in general are not site wide links – someone with any sense if they did post a full collage would do it on a page a little deeper on their domain, just because of page load times.

Unfortunately this apparently has upset the balance at Technorati, and I am actually happy about that, because it brings lots of things out into the open.

Technorati

Technorati has great prominence in the search engines using other people’s content that people willing let them index, but the reason they have such prominence for all those cool keywords is because they have created one of the greatest linkbait systems on the internet, Technorati tags. The microformat even defines:-

The destination of a rel=”tag” hyperlink is required to be a tag space (a place that collates or defines tags), where the last segment of the path of the URL is the tag

Unless you have your own tag pages internally, there isn’t a huge amount of tag spaces to link to, and the default choice is Technorati for most people, though there are a few other options such as Wikipedia and a few PPC sites.

A while back Technorati started to use “nofollow” on their links to their sources of information to stop benefiting splogs, but if search engine rank wasn’t important to Technorati, they would create all their widgets and links with the nofollow code. But business is business and Technorati make money from advertising.
It is quite possible that Google and the other search engines have already had to take action to devalue the weight of Technorati tags, not too much, but enough so that the top search results for all those terms frequently used wasn’t always Technorati, which might be full of untrusted user generated content.

Technorati created their own importance in search results – they are one of the few “search engines” that appear in natural search results. Using robots.txt would solve that, but Technorati like the traffic.

I actually love Technorati, but I think this is making mountains out of molehills. There are bigger issues which effectively ensure that the z-listers have no chance of rising to the surface without some creative effort.

It should be noted that Technorati haven’t issued any kind of penalty to the participants in the 2000 Bloggers meme, as I just read over on Design Sojourn in a comment by Ian Kallen of Technorati.

Just to clarify: Technorati is not taking punitive measures against 2000 Blogger participants. What was announced was simply an adjustment to our indexing to filter out copy-and-pasted sets of links since our ranking is premised on links that are more conventional social gestures such as replies and citations. There is certainly a good deal of FUD being posted elsewhere about elitism, coercion, and so forth but given what was actually announced, I hope you’ll see through the subterfuge and feel assured that there’s no heavy hand to be scared of. We’re here to serve you and help you make your voice heard, we’re listening.
best regards,
-Ian

Blog Networks

2000 bloggers, it is only a single page on most of the blogs that might be affecting the Technorati ranking results. With blog networks small and large, all those sitewide sidebars also affect Technorati in a major way, and so does preferential linking to same network sites.

Employee Networks

Robert Scoble has discussed Microsofts internal blogger mailing list and the way they can effectively Googlebomb any product for a brand name. Whilst they might not have everyone on their blog roll (3000 bloggers), I am sure there is a lot of internal linking.

Widgets

There are a lot of widgets out there that give real links back to their creators, and whilst this might not affect blogs it certainly affects search results. The thing is the links in most cases are justified because they go to information pages about the widget.
Links are just pointers as Carsten recently discussed over on Search Engine Journal.

If I tag something with the word “WordPress”, it often ends up in a sidebar RSS feed on a blog tracking wordpress, or someones shared feed reader stream that is being indexed. That link appears in Technorati’s index, even if it is temporary.

Syndicated Content

The web, and Technorati are full of syndicated news stories, press releases and articles.

Some of my blog content occasionally gets syndicated, and that appears in Technorati reselts. Some of it is on popular sites, “legitimate syndication” – other times it is “illegitimate syndication”, which would be classed as legitimate if it was on a PR7+ site, but because it is a new site collecting snippets of blog posts on a single specific theme, they are referred to as splogs. At least most of them link back to me with a live link to the source, and if they pick it up directly rather than from Technorati, they get links in the content as well.

I have seen uncliamed RSS feeds in Technorati in the 5-6K range simply because the feed was being syndicated.

Other Tag Farms / Indexes

The good new is it seem that Technorati already filter out feeds from places like the WordPress.com tag index. It is quite likely that index still affects other search results in a big way. WordPress.com don’t use nofollow for their links to/from the indexes as I have previously discussed.

Linkbait

This interview with Tino carried out by Li Evans is now been highlighted as proof that Tino was doing this all just as link bait.

If you create something cool, people link to you. Lots of people create cool things for links and don’t get slammed. Lots of people deliberately highlight controversial stories over and over again just to get attention. Hell even I am writing this hoping I might get a link or 2 from people interested in a different opinion. (and I don’t have nofollow on my trackbacks)

What Tino didn’t expect is that people would carry the thing one stage further and copy all the images with links to post on their blogs.
Tino has suggested a widget, for the future, but that could easily be created with Ajax so that it doesn’t affect results in Google and Technorati, and is just there to give people somewhere cool to continue their browsing, human selected.

Even Matt Cutts believes in good link bait – I wonder what he thinks of 2000 Bloggers…

Conclusion

2000 Bloggers was just a blip, or a small bush fire easily snuffed out.

2000 Bloggers Lives on –

For some reason every single link on Tinos blog is now nofollow – I didn’t think that is possible with blogger as many thing are included automatically – was such action really called for?

I am going to dedicate this post to the shared stance I have with Dane Morgan on Nofollow. If you don’t understand what he means by “Pink Boxes”, this post I wrote a while ago on nofollow will help.

Update: I have done some more snooping and it seems that a number of sites hosted on Blogger have the following added:-

meta name=”ROBOTS” content=”NOINDEX,NOFOLLOW”

I don’t know anyone that would do something like that deliberately to a blog they had worked on for months / years.

The problem is you have to be using the new blogger, and there seems to be some access restriction for existing Bloggers.

Previously Amit posted a way to get around the new blogger restrictions which I think he found among Ionut’s comments.

I have just tried that work around, and it didn’t work for me, so maybe Google have closed that loophole.

The thing I am interested in most is this note Amit made:-

Now the best part – even if you move from abc.blogspot.com to abc.com, your old links would still work and Google [via a simple DNS settting] will redirect the traffic to your new URLs. And the addresses of your blog posts saved on Digg, Del.icio.us would also work.

Having already moved my blog from blogspot to my own domain, I would appreciate a rock solid redirect with a 301.
Whilst I have previously mentioned Google seem to be following meta redirects, that might not be 100% reliable, and that doesn’t account for other search engines.

Yahoo and MSN seem to have kicked my old blogspot with the meta redirects out of the search index, but are not passing on old link equity in the way Google does.
For over a year before the redirect from blogspot I was holding top3 on all 3 major search engines.

Well almost…

It is not as good as a 301 redirect, as it will not transfer pagerank.

There is also a bug I found which means I will have to go through my imported content carefully checking page slugs.

It will however transfer traffic from my old domain to my new domain, directly to the content they are looking for. My old site used to pick up a fair amount of traffic from various search engines.

The code I am using for the redirects can be found at:-

Moving from Blogger to WordPress: Best Practices

Watch out for the default location in the code “/blog/”, as if you are installing WordPress in the root domain, you might have to make additional changes.

Lets see it in action…

One of my most popular posts on my old blog was

Submit Articles – 3 Killer products (at niche-website.blogspot.com )

This now redirects to the relevant page on this domain

Submit Articles – 3 Killer Products (on this domain)

I actually found a bug, though it might be either a blogspot one, or a WordPress import bug. For some reason the above article when it was imported, was imported with “-extended” in the page slug.
Wordpress behaves correctly for normal articles, as if you change the title of a post, it doesn’t change the page slug unless you do it manually.
Blogspot seems to also behave correctly, because a page with “-extended” doesn’t exist, and the original page before the title was changed does exist.

Thus it is my belief that the current WordPress Import from blogger is somehow “asuming” that page slugs should be taken from page titles on Blogspot, and creates its own slugs based upon the titles, not the actually pages used.

Maybe it is a limitation on the data Blogger can provide for WordPress to import the posts, but it is a bug from a users perspective. It won’t show up frequently, because not many blogger users will change a post title after it has been posted… maybe

The work around is to check your page slugs compared to your old blog, and test every redirect. The best place to do that is from within the Edit Posts section of Blogger, and to CTRL click “View” to open each page in a new tab.