A blog powered by Blogger.com does have difficulty ranking for search terms from my experience and there are quite a few reasons I suspect so let’s get into it. I had my personal blog on WordPress, then I moved it over to Blogger and now I’m using Ghost.org for that site.
This personal blog that was getting around 150 visitors with a day with 40 posts that was powered by WordPress and Bluehost that I moved over to Blogger.com as an experiment and for tutorial purposes for my YouTube channel.
After doing a proper 301 redirect, the traffic and rankings tanked with the same exact content and any new content that I published failed to be indexed for competitive keywords and failed to get any amount of impressions (via Google Search console).
So what gives? Here are some reasons I suspect why Blogger.com blogs are difficult to rank.
Lack of trust due to spam and low quality content
As Blogger.com is a free blogging platform and a free web host, it’s a platform that is going to attract a lot of low quality content, spam, AI written articles, casual writers and so forth. It seems that any blog powered by Blogger.com is just not indexed and ranked the same way as using a web host or a website builder like Wix or Squarespace.
Perhaps it’s due to the IP address of the site being tied to Blogger.com? Regardless, it’s possible to rank and get traffic to a Blogger blog, it’s just a lot more difficult than if you were using WordPress and a web host.
If you take a look at some quality Blogger blogs like JohnnyFD.com that has hundreds of posts, or Unenumerated (a blog written by a literally genius) using tools like aHrefs or Ubersuggrest, you’ll be shocked to see that these blogs struggle to get more than 50-100 visitors a day.
Dates in the URL
There are quite a few permalink structures you can choose, but by far the worst structure is having dates in the URL unless you’re a news website that creates time sensitive content.
Currently, blog posts published with Blogger.com are stuck using dates and there is no way to change this as it’s a limitation of the Blogger.com CMS and architecture. Back when Blogger.com was founded over 20 years ago, having dates in the URL was common as blogging was a form of journaling.
You were creating a log, a weblog more specifically that has now been shortened to “blog” so having dates in the URL to go along with the content you published made sense then. While you’ll see a lot of tutorials claiming you can remove dates by jumping into the HTML, you do risk breaking your site.
.html self closing tab
Another URL feature of blogger that I don’t like that is also been phased out with other blogging platforms is that all your posts end in an .html self closing tab. There are good reasons for having .html at the end, but for a blog post it’s not needed anymore and web browsers don’t really care. If you want a more technical deep dive on this, check this breakdown out.
Can you rank a blogger.com blog?
Yes, but it’s going to take a lot more work with internal linking, building backlinks, finding that right balance of creating content for under served topics that people are looking for and content for competitive phrases related to your blogs topic.
But why go through all this difficulty? Web hosting is not particularly expensive and you’ll have better long term results if you’re trying to build an income generating web property using something like WordPress as you have full control over the look, feel, design and layout of your website and blog.
Not to mention that it’s easier to sell a self hosted website than it is a blogger.com blog and you’re not limited in any way like you are with Blogger. But if you’re looking for a blogging platform for casual use for fun and to share thoughts then blogger.com is perfect for that.
Do blogger blogs rank on Google?
Blogger blogs do rank on Google, but nowhere near well as blog powered by WordPress on your own web host. If you want to use blogger to spin up a site for fun that you casually blog to then by all means go for it. It’s also a good platform if you intend on using social media as your primary traffic source.
I quite like the platform and that’s why I create video tutorials and blog posts on it. But if you’re looking to build out a high traffic website that makes money from advertising and affiliate marketing then I would not build on the blogger.com platform.
It’s good for a side project and a potential side income, but not good enough to be the primary focus of a content marketing business.
