Blogger - Host on blogspot or own site?

Pro's and Con's?

[rbacal]

I'm looking at setting up a blog using Blogger. I'm trying to decide if it would be better to have the blog hosted on blogspot, or have it hosted on one of my existing sites.

Anyone have any comments about the pro's and con's of each?

Also, I'm new to blogging (but not web building). Are there any really good discussion boards where I can learn the in's and out's of making a blog work?

[freewebsiteideas]

The nice thing about blogspot is that it's easy to "blog this" when you find other content that you want to blog.

[Nancy99]

If you post it to your domain, you will receive search engine benefits. Each post will be indexed as a new page to your site. This keeps your content fresh and engines coming back.

If you blog on a narrow topic with a keyword dense title you will get even better benefits.

[rbacal]

If you post it to your domain, you will receive search engine benefits. Each post will be indexed as a new page to your site. This keeps your content fresh and engines coming back.

Are you sure that it won't work the same way with blogger/blogspot? It appears to be able to create a new page per article.

I can think of other benefits to hosting to a domain (more flexibility, ability to take advantage of ssi and other types of features, more control, perhaps), but I also see downsides, re: issues around server load and bandwidth (potentially).

Obviously the worst thing to do is to keep changing one's mind, so I want to make a decision, and stick to it.

PS. Apparently blogger is beset with technical difficulties regarding ftp publishing, so right now, I'm staying put until that appears to be remedied.

[Nancy99]

Yes if you post on blogspot search engines will still index your page, but why draw traffic to blogspot when you can draw it to your own site.

Plus have you ever tried to customize a blog template on blogspot where you have no ftp access it is painful.

[phantombookman]

It's very cheap to do properly
I have just done own domain, unique IP, good hosting company and using wordpress (which is fantastic).

If you actually want a proper blog that you intend to keep, do the above, its better, safer and offers many more options for the future.
I think there are a lot of seo benefits as well

[Abhilash]

I agree with the last post. However, I ran a really interesting experiment with Blogger over the past 6 months.

I set up a few random blogspot blogs that were kept up with occasional posts over 5-6 months. There were a couple months without any posts whatsoever. There are very few inbound links to the main blogspot blog involved in the experiment.

I also set up my own blog hosted on my own server. I reference this url in all of my sig files & comments. there have quickly grown a relatively large number of inbound links to my personal WP 2.0 blog (BTW, you can "Press It" as easily as you can "Blog This" with a simple WP FF Extension available within the WP backend).

Here is the upshot: The blogspot blog recently earned a PR4 and its oubound links are starting to count for more. My own custom, more content-driven and popular WP blog on my own server is still sitting at a PR3 and very few rankings for my well-0ptimized pages.

It has to be that Google gives more crawling activity to blogspot blogs than external blogs. however, it's just so hard to conceive that Google would still care after so much garbage has been posted within Blogspot (IMHO)