Ok, so you’re trying to decide which blogging platform is better between WordPress or Blogger?  I’ll cover some of the advantages and disadvantages of each, and different scenarios where one is better than the other.

First, you need to be aware that there are two different types of WordPress:  1) hosted and 2) self-hosted.

Hosted WordPress means you’re using WordPress.com and you just create an account on their site and basically let them handle all the technical stuff.  You sign up and instantly have a site.  Your URL (web address) will look like http://yourname.wordpress.com (you can use your own domain name too, but this is how it is by default).

Self-hosted WordPress means you have your own website hosting account and domain name.  So you register a domain name (like yourname.com) somewhere like GoDaddy, then you sign up for a hosting account somewhere like HostGator, install WordPress (either manually by downloading it from WordPress.org or through a one-click install option provided by your hosting company), and you’re responsible for the technical side of things like updating WordPress.

Blogger is pretty similar to hosted WordPress, the first option listed above.  You go to blogger.com, create an account and everything is hosted on their site.  By default your website address will be yourname.blogspot.com, but they also have an option for using a custom domain name (yourname.com).

The big question is:  Are you setting up your new site to make money or is it just for fun?

This will have a big impact on which route you choose.

Money-Making Blogs/Websites

If your goal is to make money from the site, in most cases the answer is pretty clear that you’re better off going with self-hosted WordPress.  Not that it’s your only option, but often is the best one.

Why?

If you want to make money from your blog/website, you need to have control over your site.  You need to be able to set things up exactly the way you want, not being stuck working within the boundaries someone else has set.  Self-hosted WordPress is the most flexible option and has the potential to work just about any way you can imagine.

• Blogger has a couple ways to monetize your site, primarily through Google Adsense, but also Amazon Associates program.  I looked through their terms of service and content policy and didn’t see anything that would prevent you from using their service for affiliate marketing or other typical methods of monetizing a blog.  The main downside is that you’re limited in what you can do to with the layout/look of your site.  They have some nice options built in, but you are limited to what they provide.
• You can use WordPress.com (hosted) for business purposes, but mainly just for relationship-building purposes, like a realtor or lawyer who gives tips to their potential clients in hopes of getting their business.  That’s pretty different than directly making money from your blog.  WordPress.com (hosted) does allow certain types of ads on your site, but there are so many scenarios that can get your site removed, often with no way of saving all the hard work you’ve done in creating your site, and it’s just not worth it.If you want to do affiliate marketing, which is how a lot of bloggers make money from their sites, you definitely don’t want to use WordPress.com (hosted). WordPress.com lists what types of blogs are and aren’t welcome on their service and it specifically mentions says affiliate marketing blogs are not allowed on their service.  They also don’t allow sites that they consider to be “SEO blogs”, written more for getting search engine traffic than providing value to users.  That’s understandable, but where do they draw the line between that and a site that’s just properly search engine optimized?  I don’t want to find out.
• On a self-hosted WordPress site, the sky is the limit.  As long as you’re not doing anything illegal, you can do pretty much whatever you want with your site.  You have complete control over how it looks and how you make money with your site.  Besides all the free themes (templates/designs) available, there are lots of “Premium” (usually meaning you have to pay for them) WordPress themes available.  So you can often find a design you like.  And if not, you can have one custom-made.  Granted, unless you find a theme that’s exactly what you want, it does require some technical skill to get a site customized, but there are lots of tutorials online or you can hire someone to help you or do it for you.  Plus there are tons of plugins that you can add to your site that will do just about anything you can imagine – things that you’d otherwise have to hire a programmer to build.  So you can have a powerful site using things other people have already created.

Personal / Just-for-fun blogs

If you’re looking to build a site that you don’t intend to make money from, here are some pros and cons of each:

• Blogger.comPros: If you just want easy, this is a good way to go.  The interface is pretty self-explanatory and easy to figure out and use.  So if you just want to get started quickly, Blogger is a good option.  If you already have a Google account, such as Gmail, you don’t need to create a new account but can use the same login.  My first real blog was on Blogger.  I wasn’t too picky about how it looked and was fine with just going with one of their pre-made templates.  I didn’t need to do anything too fancy with it, I just wanted to get started.  Another benefit was that I would sometimes get some traffic to my site from people searching on Google’s Blog Search.  You have a fair amount of customization available with the look of your site and customizing it is pretty easy, and if you’re more technically inclined you can even edit the HTML of the template.  Even if your primary concern isn’t making money from your site but you wouldn’t mind making a little here and there, or at least have the option to do so, it’s easy to add Google Adsense to your site.Cons: If you’re more picky about the look of your site and have something more specific you want, or if you’re technically inclined and want more control over your site and like to work “under the hood”, you might prefer WordPress.
• WordPress.com (hosted)Pros: Also quick and easy to sign up.  There are lots of themes (designs/templates) to choose from, including some premium ones that you have to buy.  If you like control, it does seem to give you more control over Blogger.  There are lots of options.  It basically is like the self-hosted version of WordPress, but with a lot of the popular plugins and features already installed.  It’s easier to get started with than the self-hosted version of WordPress.  One nice feature is that if you want to get started easy but think you may later want to move to a self-hosted WordPress site, it does provide an Export option where you can export your data and import it into your new self-hosted site.Cons: I think there is more of a learning curve with WordPress than Blogger.  It has lots of features and options, but that can overwhelm new users.  It can take a while to figure out out to make it do what you want.  Some of the basic tasks are pretty easy to figure out, but other things can take a while to figure out.  The first time you log in and see the menu that stretches from the top of your browser window, beyond the bottom, full of options, it can be a little overwhelming.  Also, if you decide you want ads on your site, like Google Adsense, well, you can’t.  Also, WordPress may sometimes show ads on your site.  If you don’t want ads on your site you have to pay to upgrade.  If there are specific WordPress themes or plugins you want to use, if they’re not installed by default, it’s not possible to install them on your site.
• WordPress self-hostedPros: This is the most flexible option if you know exactly how you want your site to look or if you want complete control over it.  There isn’t much you can’t do with it.  You can use any theme (design/template) you want, any plugins you want, and if you feel so inclined, you can edit any code you want and make things work however you want.  Or you can build your own from scratch or hire someone else to.Cons: As with WordPress.com, the self-hosted solution also has quite a learning curve.  Some of the menus are just not very intuitive and you can spend a long time hunting for something that seems like it should be simple.  In addition to that, there is some expense involved.  You have to buy a domain name and pay for web hosting on an ongoing basis.  Getting WordPress installed on your site takes more technical skill as well.  Fortunately, some web hosts have one-click install options available to make it easier, but it’s still a little more work than just signing up on someone else’s website like Blogger and hosted WordPress.com.

Did you find this helpful?  Or do you have something to add?  Please let me know by leaving comments below.

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Ok, I’m going to let you in on a stupid mistake I made.

One simple little mistake knocked me off of the front page of Google and basically killed my site as far as the search engines were concerned.  In fact, it wasn’t really anything I did wrong, but one thing I didn’t do that caused these problems.

It started when I decided to install WordPress on the main site of my business, ServeSense.com.

Don’t get me wrong, that wasn’t the mistake, but that’s where the problem started.  Just so we’re clear, I’m a firm believer in WordPress.  It has changed my business.  In fact, soon I’m going to write a post about that in more detail.  But suffice it to say for now that I love WordPress and use it every day.

So what went wrong?

Well, I always used to install WordPress manually, by uploading all the files via FTP, creating a database and database user and password, then running the install script.  However, this time I decided to go the easy route.  Not that the manual route is hard, it just has a few more steps and I’m all about saving time where I can and wanted to try this other route to see if it really would make it easier.

The easy route I’m referring to is by using something called Fantastico.  And again, I’m not knocking Fantastico.  In fact, now I use it to install WordPress whenever I can.  It speeds up the process quite a bit.  But if I’m not mistaken, when I installed WordPress on ServeSense.com with Fantastico, I believe it was the first time I did it that way.  Fantastico is just a tool found in most cPanel installations that makes it easy to install quite a few different open source applications, including WordPress.  Even if you’re not very savvy when it comes to web stuff, you can probably install WordPress this way.

The Danger of Installing WordPress Through Fantastico

While Fantastico is nice and saves a lot of time, there is one significant difference when you install it this way.  In fact, it’s the only difference I’ve noticed.  As far as I can tell, everything else is the same.  But this one difference that I wasn’t aware of at the time is what caused these problems for me.

There is a setting in WordPress, under Settings -> Privacy that allows you to choose whether or not you want search engines like Google and Yahoo to be able to follow links on your site and index your site in the search engines.

When you install WordPress manually, you are given a choice of whether you want search engines like Google to be able to see your website.

Here’s what that screen looks like:

Ok, see that little checkbox that I have the red arrow pointing to?  Well, as of this writing, you don’t get that option in Fantastico.

While WordPress has that option pre-checked by default, assuming you do want your site to appear in search engines, Fantastico, for some reason, assumes you do not want your site to appear in search engines.  I have no idea why, since I’m sure most people do.  But by default, when you install WordPress through Fantastico, it’s as if they uncheck that box for you.

It’s not like it’s impossible to change or anything.  It’s a quick, simple fix (I’ll show you how in a few seconds).  But that’s assuming you know it did that.  In my case, I didn’t realize that.   I had always installed WordPress manually before that and the default setting was to have your site show up in search engines, which is what I wanted 100% of the time, so at that time I wasn’t even familiar with the options panel where you change that.  But believe me, I am now.

So if you’ve installed WordPress through Fantastico, here’s what you need to do.

Just go to Settings -> Privacy.

Here’s where to find that:

After clicking on Privacy, here’s the screen you’ll see:

See that red arrow?  It’s pointing to the default setting if you installed WordPress through Fantastico.  Obviously, all you have to do to change it is select the first option that says you’d like your blog to be visible to everyone, including search engines and then click Save Changes.

Very easy, assuming you know you need to do it.

But in my case, I didn’t realize Fantastico had set it up that way.

So months went by and I noticed my pages that were previously in the #1 spot on the first page of Google for certain keywords were no longer showing up there.  They kept dropping lower and lower until they were no longer on the first page at all.  And even the listings that appeared didn’t look right.  Instead of the page title and excerpts from the page like Google usually shows, all that showed up was my business name and the URL of my home page (instead of the page that was optimized for my keywords).

Obviously I was wondering what in the heck was going on.

I looked at my pages and I did notice one problem that I thought might have been the reason.  Before I switched my site over to WordPress all my links included www. (as in http://www.servesense.com), but after installing WordPress, the www. was missing.  As far as users are concerned, it’s not a big deal.  If someone types in www. in the address, WordPress just redirects them to the non-www. version.  But it’s better not to have those redirects going on if you can help it.

This isn’t normally much of an issue, but I had an existing site with existing pages indexed by Google and Google had indexed them all as having www. in the URL.  Now all those URLs were redirecting elsewhere (to just http://servesense.com – without the www. in the URL).  So that’s easy enough to fix.  You just go under Settings -> General and you can add the www. and then all your links include www.

So I did that and things just continued to get worse.

I don’t actually remember how much time passed (months, though) or the exact sequence of events, but at some point along the way I had a client come to me with this exact same problem.  He was using some of the web tools Google provides for webmaster and it was telling him there was a problem with his robots.txt file on his new site.  I took a look at his site and within a few minutes found the problem of the privacy setting and fixed it… problem solved (for him).

I talked with him a little and found out he had used Fantastico to install WordPress.  So now I knew to watch out for that.  But it didn’t click that I had used Fantastico on my own site.  Since then I’ve installed many WordPress installations for clients using Fantastico and one of my first steps after installation is to go into the privacy settings and make sure it’s set to be listed by the search engines.

However, for some reason, I didn’t think to check my own site for that setting.  In fact, I forgot that I even installed it through Fantastico.  So today I was thinking that my site needs some work.  I’m always getting my clients’ sites setup where both users and the search engines love them, but my own sites are often neglected.  I was just going to install a plugin for myself that I install for my clients that generates a site map and notifies the search engines so they can properly index the site.

Well, I have to give thanks to the developer of that plugin (Google XML Sitemaps).  I installed it and it gave me a message at the top of the page that said my privacy settings are currently blocking the search engines.  My jaw dropped.  Could I have had my site set to block the search engines for the past however many months, after checking that setting almost daily on clients’ sites?  Yes, yes I had.

I clicked Settings -> Privacy and there it was staring me in the face.  Obviously I quickly corrected this and sat there for a few seconds in disbelief.

In a way, it was a relief.  I was wondering why in the world my pages had been dropping out of Google ever since installing WordPress.  I knew if anything Google should have liked my site more.  So I was really puzzled as to why that was happening.  Now I had my answer.

Just in case you’re interested in what exactly this setting does on a technical level, it does a few things.  It adds a “nofollow” meta tag, it generates a virtual robots.txt file that returns a “Disallow: /” (which tells search engines not to index anything at all on the site), and also disables the pinging function that normally notifies pingomatic that you’ve updated something on your site.  For a little more detail, here is the WordPress page that explains the Privacy SubPanel.

So that’s what happened to me and why it happened.  Besides all the pages that were previously getting great ranking dropping out of Google’s search results entirely, the pages also show no Google PageRank anymore.  I’m curious how long it’s going to take for things to get restored.  The site has been around for a number of years, so I’m sure that will count for something.  But I also unknowingly had it blocking the search engines for months.  So we’ll see what happens.

I decided the first thing I’d do after fixing this setting and generating a sitemap is to write a new post so the search engines can get pinged and hopefully Google will start indexing my site again.  And what better topic to write about than how this happened?  Hopefully it will help someone else who is wondering why Google suddenly stopped liking their site after installing WordPress.  As I mentioned, it has nothing to do with installing WordPress, but just using Fantastico to install it.

Did you enjoy this article?  I’d love to hear your comments.