You've probably heard time and time again that it's not a good idea to use a free blogging platform like Blogger for your company blog. After all, it looks incredibly unprofessional when you see that a company blog has a URL such as this one: http://yourcompanyname.blogspot.com. However, that's not the only reason why you should avoid Blogger.



The Loss of SEO Benefits

If you are running a company with an online presence, you undoubtedly have a company website with its own domain. If that's the case, then why on earth would you want to put a blog on a free blogspot.com domain? Search engines love websites with content that is constantly updated. You lose huge SEO benefits by not hosting your blog on your company website.

Another problem arises when you try to move your blog from Blogger to another domain. Normally what webmasters do is create a ?301 permanent redirect? when they want to redirect people from the old site and forward them to the new site. Unfortunately, the Google-owned Blogger platform does not allow you to do a 301 redirect from a blogspot.com domain. That means that if you spend years building up powerful inbound links to your blog on Blogger and then you decide to move your blog to another blogging platform, you will lose all of that hard SEO work you did on your previous blog.

Moving data from a Blogger blog to another blogging platform is notoriously difficult as well. The programming interfaces provided by Google make it impossible to move all of your comments and posts as they are. Only an experienced computer programmer would be able to move all the data from Blogger to another blogging platform. On the other hand, blogging platforms like Wordpress allow you to transfer all of your data to other blogging platforms with ease.

A Lack of Features

Blogger is missing many features that are beneficial to business bloggers and pro-bloggers. People who write personal blogs will probably do just fine with Blogger but if you want to run a company blog and have high hopes for it, it's a good idea to go with another platform like Wordpress. Blogger lacks features such as contact forms, article tagging, comment editing, comment subscriptions, etc. Moreover, Blogger cannot be integrated easily into other websites such as Technorati. Customization options are limited as well since few templates are available.

Have you ever seen a highly professional blog hosted on Blogger? There may be a handful but they are the exception to the rule. Blogger has become associated with ?splogs? or spam blogs so hosting your company's blog there can ultimately give your company a bad name.

So there you have it. While Blogger is free and easy to use, it is simply not a good match for business owners who want to grow their blog and use it to increase leads. Companies that want to have a successful blog should check out Wordpress, another free platform that provides excellent tools and features.