Blogging through a "platform" - is it worth it?

[armchaircritic]

I'm wondering about the benefits of blogging through a platform? Examples inculde blogger.com, myopera, and others. Blogger.com has many successful blogs as is known, as does wordpress-hosted sites.

The jist of this is a journalist friend of mine had a wordpress-hosted blog and switched to a specific domain under his name + .info and saw a huge drop in traffic, which is now mostly just from friends, whereas before he was doing ok on a sort-of global scale with visitors from the USA and other english speaking countries. He asked me about this and I was at a complete loss to explain what happend. It seemed the wordpress affinity generated more traffic, yet since most of his visitors were from the UK he switched (to improve his jornalistic status as an independent writer) and linked from his old site to his new and things have gone downhil for him. He doesnt monetise the site in any way, so hasn't dettered readers. The design on the new site is much more open and looks a great deal better.

What are your experiences with platforms per se? Do you think they are better in the long/short term?

[ses5909]

I wonder if he was able to redirect the traffic to his new blog? if not that would explain the loss in traffic.

[aquariancore]

The blog should have been redirected.

[ses5909]

What are your experiences with platforms per se? Do you think they are better in the long/short term?

To answer this part of your question, I don't have much experience with them as I always wanted full control. some people say blogs hosted on blogger will get indexed faster because it is owned by google.

[doorlight]

I think having the right platform is not the issue why the new site's had a huge drop in traffic, maybe your friend forgot to redirect the new URL.

[armchaircritic]

Yes he only provided a link in his last post on the old site to the new. I'm not sure how he does a re-direct on a wordpress hosted blog. Is it the same as an ordinary site? Meaning, there are no restrictions on server access?

[Glen Allsopp]

He was probably missing out on a lot of search engine traffic, hence the stats drop

[doorlight]

Or just wait for search engine crawlers to get keywords from the new site.

[SarahG]

Bear in mind he went from an established site to a new domain. Sure his returning visitors would or should have followed him over but if he got a lot of passing traffic on his old site then it may take a while for this to build up on the new domain.

A new domain in Google doesn't tend to do too well for up to a year until it gets established with inbound links, content and trust from Google that it isn't spam.

Did you friend export all of his old site from the wordpress.com site over to the new one? If not then he's losing out on his historic posts. However he just needs to continue adding content and also get some inbound links into his new site. His old site probably has a lot of links to it if it was doing well and those links won't translate over to his new site. Unfortunately you can't get a 301 redirect in place on a WP hosted blog.

He needs to the social scene, mybloglog, stumbleupon, delicious, blogging forums (here for example!) etc. get the word out about what is essentially a new blog.

[Kirk M]

The biggest problems in moving a blog from a "hosted" platform to your own install is that very often the blogger simply doesn't realize everything that hosts like Blogger and Wordpress.com did in the background such as taking care of permalinks, permalink redirects and especially SEO, now had to be taken care of by the blogger themselves.

For example, in moving to a WordPress install from WordPress.com, importing your site may be easier and more inclusive than it used to be (comments never made it in the past...only posts) but that's all you get. Sure, you can tailor your new site to look exactly like your old one once you get the knack of uploading plugins and themes, but the backend of the blog is empty. Everything is default meaning there's no permalink redirects for individual posts, no "pretty permalinks", no SEO, no spam protection, basically no nothing. And if your "hosted" blog had a fair Goggle PR (mine was 4 when I moved), you start at absolute 0 or N/A once your new site is up and running. In other words, you're starting from scratch again with the exception of having imported your previous posts and hopefully your comments.

Now just in case anyone's interested, here are some things I did when I moved to my own install (I had previously moved the blog from Blogger to Wordpress.com before that believe it or not...I just couldn't stay put).

1. Made an announcement on my original blog of my intentions to move a month ahead of time and kept my readers up to date as that month progressed.

2. Once I moved and had imported my posts to the new setup, I went back to the original blog and truncated 3 months worth of posts (deleted the contents of those posts with the exception of a paragraph or two per post) and provided a link to the same post on the new site at the bottom of each of those truncated posts. Kind of like the "read more" link except it lead to the full post on the new blog. It took time but it was worth it.

3. I had to make an immediate post at the new site that none of the comments had been imported from the old blog and I couldn't take the time to bring them all over manually...sorry and all that. I also reminded folks that the feed addresses had changed also with the move. I almost didn't remember that part.

4. Did some short but intense research into what basic essential plugins I needed to install into my new do-it-myself WordPress blog. Akismet (for spam. Comes with the WP software), Permalink Redirect plugin, Simple Trackback Validation (more anti-spam) and Head Meta Description (basic SEO) for example since these more or less supplied the basic functions that Wordpress.com had supplied for me automatically.

5. Added a sitemap plugin so the Google search bots knew where to go on my new blog.

The point here is that when you first make your move to doing-it-yourself, your traffic is most likely going to take a massive drop until you have the basics setup and your readers have "found" you again. It took about four months after the move when my PR went back up to 4. I did lose a few of my readers while I was at Wordpress.com due to that hosted "community" thing but it never really bothered me at the time since most of my readers came with me on the move and I slowly gained new ones as time went on.

I really didn't mean to write a novel here but I do have a bad habit of being too wordy and the fact that I used to write operating procedures and tech manuals. :rolleyes:

Feel free to tell me to cut things short in the future. It may not help but you can tell me anyway. :p

[armchaircritic]

Kirk, that's a great answer and I'll send this link to my mate. He's not a web designer or developer, but I'm sure he can follow what is said here. Cheers.