This list isn’t in any particular order, but it’s something I’ve wanted to post about for a long time. I hate Blogger/Blogspot for a whole bunch of reasons, but since that just sounds like an exaggeration when I’m talking to clients, I want to list out all the reasons why. These were collected from around the internet, as well as my own head.

• People who blog on Blogger/Blogspot have the (default) option of requiring a reader to have a blogger/blogspot blog in order to leave a comment. It’s surprising how many people actually enforce this - and I’ve found several well-written blogs that I can’t comment on, simply because I refuse to set up a blog I’ll never use just to do so.
• They use “nofollow” by default, so you can’t even allow your regular readers/commenters to get a link back from you as a Blogger/Blogspot blog owner. Of course, this is all because of the next reason:
• TONS of spam. It’s mainly because Blogger/Blogspot is a free service, and spammers are cheap bastards.
• Unstable servers. The site appears to go down a lot, for bloggers and readers alike.
• Images automatically insert themselves at the top of the post, messing up layouts of content, and have to be re-aligned and re-published to fix.
• Their CAPTCHA service is ridiculous. All the letters and numbers are swirled and compressed together, and it almost never works the first time, even if you can make out the word.
• Blogger is owned by Google. Not that I have anything against Google (really), but Google owns a lot of online sites and services that they just haven’t either done anything with since purchase, or they’ve let slide into oblivion since purchase. I think they’ve had great intentions, but just dropped them for bigger and better things.
• Feeds don’t update regularly, and when they do, you never know if you’ll get full feeds or if it’ll revert to default partial feeds.
• It’s free. Yes, there are tons of great free services online, but for less than $4 a month, you can get a fully hosted, fully supported blog of your own using WordPress. No ugly bar at the top, no limits to your layout or design, tons of FREE plugins and FREE themes and FREE everything else you need except the $4 a month hosting. If you’re serious about your blogging, cough up the $4 a month already and you’ll eventually make it back with a little monetization, I promise. I have one blog I barely update that makes me about $300 a year still. It’s worth the $48 a year, isn’t it? (If you’re that hardup and want a free blog, at least use WordPress.com instead of Blogger.) But still, there’s nothing like having 100% customization rights on your own self-hosted blog - and NO free service allows for that. NONE OF THEM.
• According to the Blogger Status page, the image/photo uploading feature is having problems they can’t seem to get a grip on. Isn’t that nice?
• “Flagging” can be abused. Let’s say you write something pretty harsh, and enough people get up behind each other to flag you for “inappropriate content” of some kind. I know, I know… it’s supposed to be analyzed by humans, but what if they don’t like what you had to say? I don’t like the idea of being victim to having my site censored by strangers, do you? (Of course, WordPress.com has been known to shut sites down too, but they’re a little more particular and exact about why (ie. stealing someone else’s content, promoting porn, hate-speech, etc.) and I suppose if you’ve got nothing to fear, that would be fine. But since Blogger is more well known, more spammers use it, and more flags go up, more moderators get blinded by all the stuff, and “oops!” your blog gets banished.)
• Blind assumption that using Blogger helps in the search engines (since it’s owned by one) makes Blogger patriots defiant about switching. This simply isn’t true, folks. Get over it. Do a search in Google for “mommy blog” (extremely popular type of blog) and you get ONE Blogger blog in the top 10 (number 7 in fact, near the BOTTOM). The others are all self-hosted WordPress or self-hosted Movable Type.

Contrary to what you might read, you don’t need to be a geek to use a self-hosted blog. Most of them have very simple step-by-step installation guides (WordPress has a “Famous 5 minute installation”) and there’s lots of support on the forums for people who aren’t coders or tech-savvy. Getting a self-hosted blog can be even more simple, depending on your hosting company. GoDaddy offers it for free, with one click.

If you’re still using Blogger (or any other free blog service), I’m sure you love it and are having a wonderful time with it, but it’s time to “grow up” if you’re looking to make any real progress or money from blogging. Plain. And. Simple.

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