Postcards from the Funny Farm

Oh, but I love my blogger blog!!! I just can’t get into the Wordpress one…maybe I’ll give it another try…

Jessica

I llike Blogger too, I used to host my blog there over a year ago, but their commenting system has always been so cumbersome.  Now we can’t even get a linkback when we comment there! Maybe it is that Yahoo! hosting you have? Are you in a contract? You should try topclasshost.com they are $6 a month and you get tons of features.

Yes, it’s yahoo! webhosting, which I like…it’s the wordpress I’m not that crazy about….

I think I just like my template too much :) I shouldn’t get caught up in those things…

Jessica

Yes, Blogger wants everyone to have an [account] sign in.  Is that so bad?  Recently they took away the URL linkback for the anonymous commenter. 

Hi Rosemarie.  The article I reference in this post has all the answers as to why it’s bad, but here’s a summary of the reasons I don’t like it:

Before, another blogger from anywhere could post a comment on a blogger/blogspot post and get a link back by adding their blog address and name. This in turn created a backlink via the name field which led back to the bloggers blog.

Google has changed this and made it almost impossible to get a backlink to your blog unless you add your blog address within the actual comment. What they want to do now is sign up for a Google account which allows you to add your user name to the comment, add a nickname or leave an anonymous comment.

What Does This Mean To A Blogger?

For one thing you wont receive a backlink to your blog. To make matters worse it could alter a lot of things.

Technorati - After 6 months, all back links from blogger/blogspot blogs will disappear which could alter things on technorati drastically.

Advertising - A lot of advertising networks use the number of back links as an indicator to how popular a site is, what happens when all the links disappear.

Statistics - Loads of people use the back links for statistics and to measure their blogs growth. Doing what Google have done will make this very hard to measure where traffic is coming from if its from another blogger/blogspot blog.

Finding New Blogs - In the long run it will stop bloggers finding each other. I follow any comments left on my blogs back to the blog that left them by clicking on the name field of the comment. I sometimes end up subscribing or becoming a fan of the blog I visit. What Google have done is basically stopped communication between bloggers. Stopping the core feature of blogging which is getting the word out and getting noticed by spreading news around.

Why?

Who knows, it will create more accounts for Google thats for sure. It also means you have to have a Google account to get anything worth while out of blogging on blogger.