While Blogger Buzz sings the praises heaped on it from a recent PC World article, Google still seems to be using the “no follow” protocol to stop their own search engine spiders from indexing Blogspot addresses. This is totally unfair to the majority of blogs hosted on Blogspot. There are many, many highly rated blogs on Blogspot but they certainly don’t get any search engine loving from Google. A few quick searches on several different search engines will easily display the disparity in page rankings for a particular blog address. If it’s hosted on Blogspot, you’re lucky to find any listings for it at all on Googles search engine. The same exact searches on MSN or Yahoo will give you some eye opening results. Try it yourself and see! This seems to be Googles “dirty little secret”.
Most blogs are legitimate as opposed to being a spam blog or “splog” created by the hundreds and thousands by automatic software and used only to dump thousands of links to boost search engine rankings. Unscrupulous users of these automated programs are certainly ruining the experience for everyone else but ultimately the blame lies clearly at Googles feet. By not implementing anti-splog measures early on to stop the use of automated blog creation programs they let the situation get out of control. Their knee jerk reaction of wholesale removal and blocking of blogs using their own anti-splog bots has caused quite a few legitimate bloggers to be locked out of their own blogs. And then instituting a “no follow” to block their spiders from properly crawling and following all links originating from any Blogspot address has caused a devastating effect on their own blogging community.
Blogspot has certainly become the “red-headed stepchild” of Googles own making, yet people still love it for its easy to use interface and features and it’s many great long time communities. Yet they continue to advertise it heavily everywhere you look, too bad they don’t tell you up front that your blog no matter how ultimately popular it becomes will be shunned by their very own search engines.
A new article today on Blogger Buzz claims they are making “progress” in the war on spam blogs but I say it’s not enough. They should give back the respect to the many legitimate Blogspot communities by removing the “no follow” rule and giving all the great blogs on Blogger the spotlight they deserve!
Technorati tags: Google, Blogger, Blogspot, blogging, no follow, Blogger Buzz, splog, spam bot
