Robb's Not Especially Positive Review of Blogger
February 25, 2022
Robb's Not Especially Positive Review of Blogger
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with Blogger
I use Blogger to provide SEO support for my online store and for some marketing support. Blogger is very good at creating easy, Google-legal external backlinks within the context of a legitimately informative article. I don't need to try and sneak external backlinks into various blog comments or do anything else that is unethical. Currently, I have over 80 posts focused on my online store. Each article is either about a unique product that my store provides or deals with an issue that is very specific to the products that I sell.
Pros
- As I mentioned earlier, external backlinks.
- Writing small, quick articles that don't require a lot of formatting or visual content.
- Adding up to 200 characters worth of relevent hash tags.
- Adding a relatively long, detailed title for your post.
- Adding a relatively long, detailed description for your posts.
Cons
- Formatting, especially for visual content is abysmal.
- Don't even think about trying to write a long post in Blogger. There is no easy way to structure one.
- Even though it's a Google product, you really have to poke around outside of Blogger to learn how to create an XML file that you can submit to Google Sitemaps.
- Google does not give you an over-abundance of tools for creating a visually attractive blog.
- It's free and as long as you understand what it does best and its limits, free can be good.
- Ease of using it as a tool that can help reinforce a Google-legal SEO strategy.
- Once you understand how to use Blogger's very limited formatting capabilities it has value for creating quick, concise posts.
- Positive or negative impact is difficult to quantify because of how I use Blogger.
- Outside of using it for SEO purposes, it has absolutely no value for me at all.
- I would say it's safe to say that it has no direct impact on my business, positive or negative.
- WordPress and TypePad (discontinued)
I started using Blogger instead of TypePad because Blogger was free and like so many other early web products. TypePad could not keep up with changes in how things were evolving and was not worth the money you paid for it. If you need a blog that has any level of real complexity, needs formatting, and a decent amount of visual content WordPress.org type sites/blogs smoke Blogger every time. There is no comparison. You can create complex documents with all kinds of visual content that you could never do in Blogger. WordPress.com blogs are a different story and no longer have any real value for me because of changes to how their formatting is done (I'm not especially tuned into blocks). At this point, I would rather use Blogger because I can knock out a post that is focused on enhancing my main site's SEO a lot faster.
Do you think Blogger delivers good value for the price?
Yes
Are you happy with Blogger's feature set?
No
Did Blogger live up to sales and marketing promises?
No
Did implementation of Blogger go as expected?
Yes
Would you buy Blogger again?
Yes
Using Blogger
1 - Owner and director of marketing. That would be me. I write the copy for the blog, podcast, and videos. I made/make the decisions on the philosophy behind the content and help shape the voice. Whenever possible, we always want to tell a story about what we are providing to the customer.
1 - You have to understand basic SEO and very definitely understand metatag titles, descriptions, keyword phrases, and hashtags. You also have to implicitly understand that all of the above has to be 100% relevant to the content in the post. It also helps if you can write well enough to hold someone's interest for about 1200 characters.
- External backlinks.
- Quick, concise product explanations.
- Concise and easy-to-understand explanations of semi-scientific concepts.
- Using it for external back-linking.
- Nothing else that I can think of.
- Unless Google surprises me and dramatically expands the formatting capabilities of the product, I can't see anything else I could use it for.
Evaluating Blogger and Competitors
Yes - TypePad. I ditched TypePad because they changed how it worked and made it a lot more complicated without creating any added benefits. It became a lot more trouble than it was worth. Also, Blogger was free. After a couple of years, I replaced Blogger with a WordPress.org blog and haven't looked back.
- Price
Yeah, it was free and TypePad was charging you on a monthly basis. After TypePad rewrote the app it was a total mess so switching to a free blog app was an easy decision.
Considering when this happened and how relatively primitive software was compared to today I don't think I would have changed anything. Even back then, you had certain expectations of the software, and if it let you down too many times you ditched it and moved on. Also, there was not a lot of viable competition so when something better and cheaper showed up you just made the move.
Blogger Support
| Pros | Cons |
|---|---|
Good followup | Slow Resolution Less knowledgeable Problems left unsolved Not kept informed Difficult to get immediate help Support doesn't seem to care Slow Initial Response |
I don't think Google even has premium support for their free apps. Unless you're paying, their support team isn't playing...
LOL!!! If it happened it happened in another galaxy, maybe another dimension.
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