Blogspot blog vs. web site

What are the advantages / disadvantages?

[farmboy]

I'm about to start a new site. It will basically be a news site geared towards a particular industry.

What are the advantages / disadvantages of using a Blogspot blog for this project as opposed to publishing on my own site without a blog structure?

FarmBoy

[adamxcl]

I don't know if it's just me or if anyone else has experienced this. I have a website with several blogs pointing to it. Meaning they are on Blogger, Wordpress and Movable Type, with each one pointing to a sub-directory. My problem is that although Blogger is the weakest in customization, it does the best on results. Whatever I type, it gets picked up within hours on Google, usually up at the top. The more classy blog on Movable Type takes days, even a couple weeks to get the rankings for whatever target phrase. I don't know why but it makes me almost give up on others and keep working on the Blogger one.

This weekend, I briefly mentioned the Glasgow airport incident on the Blogger one and I'm on the first page for some various G searches on it, ahead of CBS, MSNBC, Yahoo News. It kind of freaks me out how much credit I'm being given on what I write on there. And it isn't new. This has been happening like this for a year. It makes me want to try to comment on news stories like a reporter, which I'm not.

So is it favoritism or the fact that the Blogger blog is a year older than the other two, with all being on the same 1999 domain?

[doolols]

LOL - you get better results in Google from Blogger because Google own them. I'm sure Google are very even-handed about it which blogs they spider and when ;)

It seems strange - a person asks a fairly general question, and never comes back to see the wonderful array of answers to it. Weird.

Whilst we're on the subject, don't forget that Typepad is about to go Open Source - fairly obviously because of the rise and rise of Wordpress.

Multiple blogs did I read somewhere? WPMU (multi-user) works fine, and is the software Wordpress.com is running for all the WP-hosted blogs. I can see no reason for blogging on any other platform than Wordpress.

[ccDan]

There are some plugins that really help when using Wordpress as a CMS.

"Fold Page List" displays a folding page tree. There are also plugins to create static front pages or leave content that is sticky to the front page. There are also some hacks and plugins to make "wordpress seo friendly"

WordPress almost needs a forum of its own around here. ;-)

I for one would like to learn more about plugins for WordPress, especially in the area of SEO. I tried a Google search, but the results seemed more spammy than useful. (Hmm, maybe because Google doesn't own Wordpress? LOL!)