Blogspot and SEO

Well it never just rains. It has to pour. I made an offer of some free SEO reviews a while back and a nasty confluence of happenings has upset my apple cart.

But I’m going to try and get some advice out to a few more people now. And this is going to be the toughest task I’ve had in a while. You see it never dawned on me that so many folk would be on hosted blogs. Let’s just say that optimising Blogspot is not a straight forward task.

As a result I’m amalgamating the site reviews for all Blogspot blogs into one post. Apologies, but BlogSpot limits much help I can give to these hosted blogs. Here’s the post navigation to make life easier for you.

Internal navigation (this is another mammoth post)

General topics:

1. Taking Control – getting your own domain
2. Blog titles and META tags
3. Best use of the Header tag
4. Using blog categories to theme your site
5. Linking to other blogs and content
6. Keep comments on the same page

Site-specific topics:

1. bocktherobber.blogspot.com
2. twentymajor.blogspot.com
3. elblogador.blogspot.com
4. skinflicks.blogspot.com
5. theangrydome2.blogspot.com
6. greeninkpen.blogspot.com

The Blogspot Conumdrum

I’m going to jump to what I hope is a logical assumption – if you asked for some SEO advice you must be passionate about blogging. So in that vain I’ll try to offer advice that might help your blogging careers:

1. Taking Control

   If you are really serious about blogging the best advice I can give you is to take it to the next level. Hosted blog platforms are a fantastic way to get started. You don’t need much technical know how, and you can be up and blogging in a flash. There are downsides however, and the natural progression is to buy yourself a domain and publish to your own blog.

   Before I go any further I better give a warning: This isn’t a trivial matter. You will need some technical prowess (or borrow someone for a few hours to help you out).

   A search for blog hosting Ireland returns hosting with a free domain name for €42.99 p.a. That’s fairly reasonable, and you’ll find that WordPress (the same platform I publish this blog from) is highly customisable and extendible thanks to the thousands of plug-ins available. WordPress also helps you to import all your Blogger posts (beware – the new Blogger no longer supports this function. See here for more.)

   If you do decide to take the jump then many of the comments I made on the Bubble Brothers post should also be useful.
   

2. Blog titles and META tags

   I notice that the default title on Blogger posts are <blogtitle><posttitle>. My advice is to flip the order. It looks much better in Search Engine Result Pages (SERPs) because the page title is used by the search engines as the title of your listing. If you want to see what I mean go to Google and search for “site:yourblogname.blogspot.com” (stick in your own blogspot domain and remove the quotes). That should give you an idea of what I’m talking about.

   The page title is probably the most important element for on-page SEO. You really want to get some keywords into your titles. I know this can be difficult when you’re trying to write quirky titles that grab attention, but have a think about the phrase you would type into Google if you wanted to find a page like the one you’re writing. Test it out in Google – when you get relevant results you know you have good keywords (you can also use keyword tools, which I’ll describe in a follow-up post). Then try to include that phrase or words from it. You wont get it right every time, but chances are that you will get a bit more search engine love.

   Blogspot seems to have a built-in function for spitting out your META data. The main problem here is that there doesn’t appear to be any quick and easy method to create unique description and keyword elements for each page.

   A quick Google search for “blogspot meta tags” should provide a few resources to help with your META data. I wrote previously about the benefits of META Tag Optimization – you can find out how a well crafted page description, which the Search Engines use for your snippet, can increase clickthroughs and site visits.

   The other META I think you should ensure exists is the RSS link auto-discovery. If you include a META link to your feed visitors can easily add you to their reader of choice from the address bar in their browser.
   <posttitle><blogtitle>

3. Use the Header tag

   If you write long posts you should definitely break up your content with paragraphs and sub-headers. It makes life easier for your readers, but the search engines also give a wee bit more weight to content found in <h> elements. So you might find your in-page post title (not to be mixed up with your page-title, although usually the same text) will be in a <h2> element.

   If you are prone to long posts (looks in mirror) you should further break up the page with a sub-header, perhaps in a <h3> element. I use <h4> for my sub-headers and style them via CSS to my own preferences.

   Search engines will also pick up some theme signals from the text you use in your sub-headers so try to retain and extend you primary post title through the sub-header text your choose.

4. Blog categories

   Unfortunately this wont work so well for Blogspot blogs, but the category names and URLs you use also help to theme your content. If you look at my blog I include the category name in the URL and try to use descriptive anchor text to help silo and theme my content (siloing is an architecture technique used to theme areas of a website). Again, as with post titles, try to think of the terms you would use to search for the theme or category your writing about, then try to use those words as your category names.

5. Linking to other blogs and content

   If you are blogging about more serious content then it can help to link to authority content on the web. Linking to a Wikipedia article or a post by an authority blogger can help the search engines apply theme (did I mention theme already?).

   Links out also help get you traffic. You probably know about trackbacks and pings, but basically if you link to another blog you will more often than not appear as a comment in the post you linked to. If the opening sentence or two of your post is interesting you will get traffic from the trackback.

6. Keep comments on the same page

   I know that some bloggers leave the comments on a pop-up page. Personally I like to see the comments on the story page. Others may differ. But from a search engine perspective it is often better to incorporate the comments into the story page, especially if you do not have a strong back link profile. If your comments are not published on your post page then you should probably read my advice to John McWilliams on site architecture.

   I believe the way to change how Blogspot publishes your comments is Dashboard->Settings->Comments->Show comments in a pop-up window?->NO.

Some specific advice for the Blogspot bloggers

1. bocktherobber.blogspot.com

   There’s not much wrong that I can see. If i could I would exclude the search pages via a robots.txt file (or through the METAs) as these pages are turning up in the supplemental index. You could try hunting down the links that the bot is crawling to find those pages and add rel="NOFOLLOW NOINDEX" to those links.

   I cant see too many links from your site to anywhere (checked a few posts – MSN Live LinkFromDomain: operator is kaput at the minute). If you want to add relevancy and theme to your pages I would link out to related content if possible. You seem to have, how shall I put it, unique content however

2. twentymajor.blogspot.com

   In fairness Twenty didn’t ask but I said I’d drop him in the pot anyhow.

   First things first, Twenty no longer posts on Blogspot. Yippee. One convert. Twenty can now be found at www.twentymajor.net. A couple of things:

   Now that you have your own domain I would look into transferring your content if you haven’t already done so. Then take a look at my Bubble Brothers post, in particular the “Redirecting Blogspot with a 301 Redirect” section. In your case you may be able to set up the redirect, your visitors will all automatically be sent to your new blog, and, best of all, you will keep all that authority and link love you’ve built up (Twenty’s old site was a PR7 site). Whatever you do don’t let that Blogspot domain lapse.

   The other thing I would do is fix the canonical URL issue. Your new site resolves to both

   http://twentymajor.net/

   and

   http://www.twentymajor.net/

   You’ll find some more info about Canonical URL in Point 9 of my Google Best Practice article.

3. elblogador.blogspot.com

   This blog looks well and the content seems very well written. But there is one gaping issue that I can see – the bandwidth consumption. The homepage is a staggering 1.32MB. This is primarily down to the images used. You should look into compressing those images if possible because for the majority of Irish Internet users your page load times would be really off-putting. The header image (top_div.gif) alone weighs in at 55KB.

   A would reduce the number of posts on both your homepage and archive pages:

   Dashboard->Template->Page Elements->Blog Posts->Edit->(Pop-Up) Number of posts on main page
   
   And as you seem to be quite a prolific blogger:

   Dashboard->Template->Page Elements->Archive->Edit->(Pop-Up) Frequency->Daily or Weekly

   If you already on a daily frequency there’s not a lot you can tweak (apart from blogging less which isn’t really a solution).

   As a political blog I would also take a look at the post titles – some could be more descriptive in my view and could contain more accurate references to the content:

   Outrage!

   to perhaps:

   Outrage! – Mandelson Bent Over Backwards for Sinn Fein

   (Having ‘Mandelson and ‘Sinn Fein’ in title will help with post theme, but to me the idea of Peter Mandelson bending over backwards is considerably more catchy and more likely to grab my attention.)

   You seem to have a lot of posts in the supplemental index, including some fairly recent stuff. This is a it worrying, but perhaps you could try a bit more internal linking from one post to another. So in one post you might reference in an earlier post. This might help.

   The other possible solution is to leave internal links when commenting on other blogs – rather than leave your URL as

   http://elblogador.blogspot.com

   leave a post URL like

   http://elblogador.blogspot.com/2007/
   03/arthur-m-schlesinger.html

   Of course this will only make a difference from non-Blogger blogs, and blogs where the owner hasn’t NOFOLLOW comments.

   I suppose you could also try building a few links here and there – more backlinks will lead to more pages coming out of the supplemental index.

   There’s not a whole lot more I can add apart from taking the dive to your own host. You’re doing as good a job as you can with Blogspot.

4. skinflicks.blogspot.com

   Without sounding like a broken record, I think that quite a lot of the same issues I see with elblogador also apply here. Not so much the images, but the number of pages in the supplemental index really surprises me. You actually have a decent amount of backlinks, and I a couple of directory links in there also. If you have the time then I would keep adding a couple of directory links a week. You can find new, free, human edited directories over in the Digital Point directory sub-forum. Just a couple of directory links alongside your regular links will help. Just make sure to use appropriate anchors and deep-link (link to page other than your homepage) at every given chance. Again, my Getting into Google post might help, particularly point 6.

   If there is a way to NOFOLLOW the category labels I would do this also. In my Blogspot Dashboard (the newer version) I can edit the templates, but they are in xHTML with XML flavouring so it’s not clear to me if it is possible to manually NOFOLLOW those label links. If anyone knows how to edit in NOFOLLOWs please leave a comment.

   Otherwise I suppose your blog titles are a little generic. I would try to get some more focused keywords in there where possible. Of course this may not be appropriate for your readers – bear in mind that my advice is primarily for the Search Engines.

   Apologies I cant offer any more.

5. theangrydome2.blogspot.com

   I’m afraid it’s more of the same – lots of pages in Google’s supplemental index. Good to see you using video. I think readers like to have text content mixed up with some rich media.

   You seem to have plenty of links showing via Yahoo!, but from a quick glance there seems to be a high proportion of blogroll links (Google is only showing 1 link currently – either a glitch or they don’t like the blogroll links). If this is the case you should try to get a few editorial links (links embedded in blog posts) to mix it up a bit. In my experience embedded links will give you a far greater boost than blogroll links. Not sure how you should best go about that, but maybe try to start discussions that go back and forth between blogs.

   As with others, you have quite heavy pages – about 200KB for your homepage. You could try tweaking the default number of posts shown per page from 7 to 4 or 5 to reduce this somewhat. You might make some poor dial-up soul a bit happier.

   Again, you might find some of the general comments I made above useful when it comes to your on-page stuff like titles and headers.

6. greeninkpen.blogspot.com

   Right last Blogspot blog I’m going to look at. And again I can see about 1/3 of indexed pages in the supplemental index. I’m beginning to be at quite a loss. Google shows 32 backlinks to your site, Yahoo! shows 422 backlinks. There really doesn’t seem to me any good reason that a blog with 140 odd pages can’t be supported by those backlinks. Again I have to fall beck to a belief that Blogspot is inherently weak when it comes to search engine indexation.

   Similar issues to page size, with a 610KB payload for your homepage. Images seem to be the culprit so any attempt to reduce the image weights will certainly help you retain any dial-up visitor.

   One other thing worth mentioning – I would try to ensure that you have at least some text in most posts. I can see a couple of posts that just have an image or perhaps an image and some links. It’s nigh on impossible to rank most posts that don’t contain at least some plain text.

Conclusion

The more I look at Blogspot the more I think that there is something wrong with the architecture of that platform. When I see pages that had received Pagerank (yep, it’s only toolbar PR) that subsequently go supplemental I have to wonder whether the archive architecture is the problem. And I wonder if the problems would persist if the same blog was on WordPress or similar?

I want to apologise to the Blogspot bloggers who asked for my advice. I really hadn’t considered the implications of hosted blogs – I’m so used to viewing Blogspot as a spam platform that it didn’t dawn on me that many people actually use the platform for quality content. (I probably should mention that Blogspot is absolutely notorious for splogs and sneaky redirects. If you want proof then just head over to www.blogspot.com and check the recommended blog link bottom-left of screen. It’s NOFOLLOWed – they don’t even trust the blogs they recommend!)

Individual advice to each blogger is limited because, to be honest, you will all suffer from the same deficiencies in the Blogspot platform. My wish is that I could offer more, but the blogging platform that is Blogspot has become my nemesis. I do hope, however, that you will all find something of use in this post (and if you only read the small piece relevant to your blog I strongly advice you read the whole piece – most of this applies to all Blogspot blogs).

I hope to make some amends by publishing a guide to blog post keyword research using freely available tools. The guide should help you write posts that increase your search engine visibility. It may take me a couple of weeks to put it all together (and finish the rest of the reviews), but I will post something here ASAP.

Oh, and one final observation for this post. Is it just my imagination or do Irish bloggers tend to curse a lot?

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