Can Blogger Blogspot Blogs Rank In Google?

 I am a blogger. I want to write articles about things I care about, have them crawled, indexed, and ranked by search engines, and have people organically find and read my content. I am not writing only for me (although I do enjoy the process of blogging and writing my ideas out), I am writing to attract and inform/entertain an audience.

If my content does not rank in the search engines, then nobody will find my content, and there is much less of an incentive for me to be blogging.

From Google's perspective (and the other search engines), it seems that they want to show users the best possible content which will satisfy their queries. They should not have any biases for or against any sort of content. So long as a piece of content is valuable to readers, it should show up in the results. That is just good business for them.

With the millions of blog posts being published every day, it is very difficult for a company like Google to determine which articles are the best quality and most useful for its users. Even if there were only a few million posts and no new posts were being added, that is simply too much content to be reviewed by humans. The scale of published content means that the content must be evaluated algorithmically by software.

That makes sense.

One way that search engines determine which content is good and which is bad, or at least which is better than others, is by counting the number of backlinks to each article from other websites. The way they see it, links from one site to another are like votes from the first site in support of the content on the second. Seen this way, the more links a site has pointing to it, the better the content there, and the more highly that content should be ranked within the SERPs.

This is a great way to start judging content algorithmically, but there are over 200 ranking factors used by Google to order published content by relevance and quality. While some of those ranking factors have been figured out by major SEO research companies, other are unknown or only speculated about.

One category of ranking factor is the domain the blog is hosted on. Domain Authority is the collective value attributed to a website based on the whole content of all of its pages. This can mean that a site which has lots of links and lots of referring domains across the whole site can rank pretty well for individual pages which, themselves, do not have many backlinks. The quality Google believes the site contains vouches for individual pages.

While often thought about in a positive, cumulative way, where over time your Domain Authority basically only goes up, it might be possible for it to work in the opposite way.

Google may determine a domain to be of poor quality and despite the value offered by a specific posted article on the domain, Google would hold back its ranking potential because of a grudge it has against the domain as a whole.

I can think of spam as being a good reason to do this. Google might be flexible and forgiving of a website which makes a few mistakes or does a few things it recommends against, but if a given domain is seen to offend consistently over time, maybe Google will just judge that domain as being untrustworthy and not worth ranking in their SERPs. Such a policy would help users more often than it would hurt users, and when your business is run by algorithms, that is about the best you can hope for in a decision.

Honestly, what are the chances that a blog that is filled with hundreds of pages of spam all of a sudden creates a banger of an article that is filled with super valuable information that readers would love?

Probably not very likely.

But I have come to think that there might be another, less justified, sort of Domain judgement penalty being applied wholesale.

Are freehosted Blogger blogs (those with a URL structure like : BlogName.Blogspot.com) being ranked poorly because of where they are hosted? Does the content of an individual Blogger blog on a subdomain of Blogspot.com matter less than the content on a self-hosted blog through a Content Management System (CMS) like Wordpress? Is there a secret penalty being leveled against people who choose to use Blogger to host their articles?

I am currently writing this article on a freehosted Blogspot subdomain using the Blogger publishing system. When I chose to use Blogger, a huge part of the reason why had to do with it being totally free to use. I don't have to pay monthly for hosting costs and I don't have to buy a domain name. I just want to put my work out there for free, and Blogger allows me to do that.

Will my choice to use Blogger negatively affect the results of my blogging? Will the content I write bring me less traffic and rank lower than if I had posted the same exact content on a self-hosted WordPress blog?

I had heard such accusations against Blogger before, but I had always kind of brushed them off as untrue. I figured that most of the people writing articles that said Blogger was a bad place to build a blog were just saying that so that they could recommend some paid hosting like Blue Host, and hopefully generate affiliate marketing income when people decided against Blogspot and chose to sign up for their own hosting. That thought still runs in the back of my mind.

But I recently found an article by Nathan Gotch of Gotch SEO where he gives 11 reasons why a person should avoid using Blogspot. There are a few which are especially convincing.

He mentions that having a subdomain URL (like BlogName.Blogspot.com) looks unprofessional and your potential readers might take you less seriously than if you had a clean domain name (like BlogName.com). That is a pretty legitimate reason to choose to buy your own domain name.

He said that it can be hard to attract backlinks because other bloggers are skeptical of freehosted blogs and even if your content is amazing, it will be an uphill battle to build a backlink profile. As much as there are other things that are important to SEO success, backlinks are undeniably important for building Domain Authority, and so if it will be hard to generate backlinks, that would be a solid reason for choosing against Blogspot as a host.

The reason I was most taken by was that he said Blogspot blogs don't perform well in Google. He said to search Google for any term you can think of and see if you can find any Blogspot blogs in the results. He claims it is very unlikely you will find any because they simply don't do well in search engines.

That really hit me.

I did a few test searches and thought back to all the Googling I've done over time and could think of only the rarest occasions when Blogspot sites would show up.

There are loads of blogspot sites out there, and you would think that if Google treated them just the same as any other sites, there would almost certainly be blogspot sites in Google results with some regularity. The statistics just seem to require it.

I read somewhere that around a third of all sites in the top million ranked sites use WordPress. Only around 1% of the top million ranked sites use Blogger. That says nothing of the total number used by each. If you consider every site on the internet, it could be that there are more Blogger sites than WordPress sites. I don't know. If that proportion holds up for the whole internet, though, then maybe there is a statistical reason why BlogSpot blogs are rarely found in search results.

I have never run a blog on a self-hosted platform, so I don't have anything to compare my current BlogSpot experience to, and what I am experiencing is totally anecdotal, but I feel like I am getting fairly decent results with my BlogSpot blog.

I currently have 38 articles posted, and around 25 of those are SEO optimized for any keywords at all. I check my Google Search Console (formerly Google Webmaster Tools) account regularly, and I almost always see a boost in the number of impressions and clicks I get after I publish new content. I also see the number of keywords I rank for growing along with the number of impressions for some of those key terms. While I am not generating lots of traffic at all yet (not even 100 views per day), I am seeing progress and growth. And all of this with so few (38) articles.

Common SEO advice says that you really won't start to see major traffic or ranking improvements until you've posted at least 50 articles.

When I run my blog through Neil Patel's free SEO tool Ubersuggest, I find that (at the time of writing this article) I am ranking for 465 keywords and have a domain rating of 3. I have about 230 incoming backlinks and the tool estimates that my monthly traffic is 67. These numbers all seem a little low, but that is excusable considering they are just estimates. My Google Analytics and Google BlogSpot data say that I get around 200 visitors a month and my Google Search Console data says I rank for at least 1000 keywords (it seems to cap off at 1000, because the number was steadily growing until it hit 1000 and it has since stopped there).

However accurate or inaccurate Ubersuggest's data is, it should at least be consistent across all websites.

When I search to find a random blogspot blog, then click on other blogspot blogs in their blogroll or click on bloggers they link to in their content or even click on the other bloggers that are leaving comments, I can quickly find a large number of freehosted blogspot blogs. These are blogs are don't pay for hosting and which don't pay for a custom domain. They are blogs that are just like mine. 

Many of the blogs I find have been around for over 10 years (so they have domain age working in their favor), they post very regularly (many at least 30 times per month), and they have accumulated hundreds if not thousands of posts. They are FILLED with content. 

And as I click through some of the stuff in their post archives, I find a mix of extremely short posts (some with just a sentence or paragraph or just a single link, maybe even just a picture) and very long, detailed posts. The long posts don't seem to be spammy at all. They are written in clear English with good grammar. They include outbound links to relevant content. They cover content that is surely searched for in Google by users. They include relevant keywords. These sites seem like they should be ranking for a ton of key terms and they should be pulling in huge amounts of traffic.

When I run these blogs through Ubersuggest, I find that they get terrible results. They get ranked for fewer than 100 keywords and get monthly traffic of between 0 and 10. They have domain ratings that are low (6-10), but are still higher than my own. The thing that really throws me off is that they have hundreds of thousands of inbound links. I saw many blogs that had 100,000-150,000 inbound links. That is a lot of links and should be enough to rank almost anything very highly. And they are mostly dofollow links.

How do these blogs have that much content and that many backlinks and be doing worse in the search engines than me? I have so few of both of those things compared to them and yet I'm doing better than them. Also, their blogs are filled with engaged comments that are clearly related to the content, not at all spam bot comments.

I have a few thoughts on what might be going on here.

It could be that the Ubersuggest tool is somehow very far off and that it is so unreliable as to tell me nothing about the sites. Maybe they are getting huge amounts of traffic and are being ranked well for thousands of keywords. I would guess this is not the case, but if it were it would explain everything.

It might be that they have hundreds of posts which are less than 50 or 100 words long and so Google slapped them with a thin content penalty that affects their entire site. Too much of their content offered no value to users, so Google just blanket decided that none of their content should be shown to users. This really could be. These people are using their blogs like their Twitter accounts, doing microblogging, and you can see how often Tweets show up as results in the SERPs. Next to never unless you are searching a celebrity's name and their own Twitter timeline comes up. Maybe too many ultra short posts is what did them in and hurt their chances of SEO success.

It might be that the posts are actually not very SEO optimized. While I skimmed the articles and noticed keywords in the content that must be keywords with at least some search volume, it might be that they are weaved into articles which have no ostensible topic that it could be ranked for. If you wrote an entire article on your feelings about macaroni and cheese and in the course of writing the article you mentioned Kanye West, would that article ever rank for the keyword "Kanye West"? It probably would not. Just using a keyword that is irrelevant to the overall topic of a blog post doesn't make that post a good result for someone searching for that term. Google might have determined that every article on the site was more of a vanity post where the author just rambled. Google might have figured that the content was not useful to anyone no matter what they keyword being searched. I can hardly imagine that out of over 1,000 posts not even 50 had a recognizable topic that it could rank keywords for. It would actually be incredibly difficult to write 1000 posts and not mention any topic people might care about. Genius level talent would be involved.

Another possibility is that they are doing something weird with their linking that Google doesn't like and it makes them look like spam sites. For instance, it seemed like a lot of those BlogSpot blogs did very regular link roundup posts where they would link out to tons of other blogs. Maybe they were including too many outbound links per post. Maybe they were sending out too many links for the number of words in their post and set off some proportion of links to words set by Google in their algorithm. It could be that having a blogroll (which they all did) and sending out links to a few sites thousands of times (because it shows on every one of their thousands of posts in the sidebar) was seen as a fishy linking scheme by Google. Maybe the reverse is true and they were penalized for getting thousands of links from just a few domains because they were featured in other people's blogrolls. It could be that they are judged for their relevance and usefulness by the DA of the sites they link out to, and since Google considers lots of the sites they link out to to be low DA, they have absorbed that low quality status for themselves.

One more linking related thought has to do with good internal linking. I believe that linking from one post on your site to another (and doing it regularly) can help visitors to your sites stay on your site longer because they find other content interesting to them and it can also help Google to understand what your content is about. It could be very helpful for Google to see that if a given blog post talks about "dogs" and that within that post they link to another post about "dogs" because it would help Google understand what those articles are really about and what to try to rank them for in the SERPs. From what I saw on these BlogSpot sites they did a very poor job of interlinking within their posts. Though I did notice some internal links from the sidebar which would take visitors to some of their most important content.

My last idea for why these massive BlogSpot blogs do so poorly in Google search is that they contain content subject matter that Google does not like. While I did not see any adult content, it is possible that it was posted once or twice in their archives and that was enough for Google to demote the whole blog. Maybe there was a bit of swearing throughout which would put the blog beyond he pale of the average web user. A most likely version of this line of thinking is that the subject matter was too political, or too full of fringe political ideas. It did seem like some of these blogs talked a lot about their political beliefs and about some more controversial political ideologies which most people cringe at hearing about. Maybe Google deemed them to be unreliable sources because of that content and so don't take their content seriously. If this were true, it would be a serious problem for the free dissemination of all available viewpoints. For Google to prevent some opinions from being surfaced at all would be for them to act as censors of information in a way that was not simply eliminating spam and misinformation.

I really don't know if any of these ideas have anything to do with the true reason for these BlogSpot site's poor results. I have been totally speculating.

If none of what I posed contributed to the lack of visibility of these sites, then the only remaining reason that I can see is that Google does not take BlogSpot blogs seriously and does not rank them simply because of where they are hosted.

If you cannot rank in Google or other search engines because you have made the mistake of writing your blog posts on Blogger, then that should be widely know and they should provide you a very stark warning when signing up for a Blogger account. Nobody should be wasting their time on a project which is doomed from the outset by the very rules of the game.

It would be awfully strange if this were the case, however, because Google purchased and now owns (and has for a long time) Blogger. Why would they devalue their own product? If anything it would seem like they would give people using their own product a little bit of a boost and an unfair advantage to attract users to Blogger.

One final thought thought I had about why you so rarely see BlogSpot freehosted blogs in search results (though this doesn't explain the blogs I've been describing which show all of the inputs for SEO success yet have no traffic or rankings) is that as soon as people find success in their free blogging career, they swiftly either move to a self-hosted blog and transfer the content or they pay for a custom domain name. If they move everything to a new blog, you might find articles that were posted on a blogspot blog, but by the time you find them they have been moved to a non-blogspot. If they were to buy a custom domain, you might be on blogger hosted blog and not even realize it. Blogger has a pretty recognizable layout and look to it and I know that I have found myself on websites which have a custom domain and no obvious connection with Blogger but are definitely hosted on blogger because I recognized the layout.

If you want to do your own research into what I've covered here, one of the blogspot blogs I looked into was called hammeroftheblogs.blogspot.com. I am choosing not to link to the site in case there would be some sort of penalty applied to my site because of what Google thinks of their site. This is one with lots of articles and backlinks and yet seems to get very little in the way of traffic and keyword rankings. If you click around from that site I'm sure you can find lots more like it in no time.

Why sites like this rank so poorly is very perplexing and I really would like to know why it is the way it is. Prevailing common opinion is that it is because of Google generally associating blogspot blogs with low quality and spammy content. I have also read (usually on Google support forums) that Google does not care where you host your blog or what CMS is used, they rank content by its usefulness and quality.

I would like my blog to serve as a bit of a public case study. I am working hard at my blog and always pushing it to grow. If I find that I am getting plenty of traffic and ranking for lots of keywords, then it obviously isn't the blogspot subdomain holding sites back. I will be wondering the whole time, though, "Would I be further with my blog right now if I had chosen to do a self-hosted WordPress site?"

What are your thoughts concerning using Blogger or any other freehost provider (such as WordPress.com, Wix, Square Space, Jimdo, Weebly, Yola, etc.)? Have my guesses as to why BlogSpot blogs seem to get little traction in search engines seemed reasonable? Have I missed anything? Do you have another idea as to what is happening in the cases I talked about here? Can a BlogSpot blog be successful? Let me know in the comments!

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