Blogger or WordPress?

Blogger or WordPress – that is the question.

While there are thousands of blogging platforms out there – these seem to be two of the most popular. The question could equally be – should I choose a free blog or should I pay for hosting and use a program like self hosted WP?

There are pros and cons to both options. However for me, one key point outweighs everything else – with self hosted WordPress you – meaning the author – OWN YOUR OWN BLOG.

Why is that so important? Well, if the site is hosted by Blogger (or a similar free service) and Google doesn’t like your site they can shut you down. While there doesn’t seem to be much chance of the Big G going out of business – other free services could disappear overnight and take your site with them.

Just recently, I have heard rumblings of situations where Google has been cracking down on sites that are known as MFA (made for Adsense). These sites are generally pretty shallow, offer no real content, and are stuffed with keywords that are perceived as being profitable.

We have to remember that Google’s main business is delivering relevant search results to people that are looking for things online. If there are a lot of junk sites cluttering up these results then searchers (Googlers) will become disillusioned with the service and defect to other engines like Bing or Yahoo. So for G – it makes the most sense to weed through all of the sites that it owns – through Blogger – and shut down the ones that can be perceived as violating it’s TOS. A little housecleaning, if you will.

This makes perfect sense to me, and as a searcher – I appreciate the effort. As a webmaster, this really shouldn’t make a difference because I should be creating quality content sites. But let’s just say, that I am extremely good at SEO, worked very hard on my Blogger site, provided good info, and used all the right keywords to do it. Would I even want to worry about the possibility that all my hard work could be taken away in an instant? Food for thought.

Here are some other things to consider when making the Blogger or WordPress decision:

Blogger

- Pros

• Free
• easy to set up
• low maintenance – upgrades are taken care of by Google
• easily customizable

- Cons

• The author doesn’t own it
• Unless using custom domain, domain name includes .blogspot
• Sometimes others don’t take sites on this platform seriously

WordPress

- Pros

• Author owns the content
• more flexibility in developing look and feel
• Lots of plugins to choose from
• Lots of themes to choose from
• also easy to set up but not as simple as Blogger

- Cons

• requires some amount of technical knowledge
• Must pay for hosting
• Must maintain and upgrade software and plugins.

Which platform do you prefer -  and why?

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