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Updated: October 2020 We keep surfing the web, sometimes more often than a common blogger because we are in the 'business' of bringing blogging tips and tricks to new bloggers and compiling blog directories. Features you look for in blogging platforms. When you search on Google for ' how to start a blog ', you get 1.39 billion webpages. Search for ' Wordpress vs Blogger ', and you still get 141 million results! Show, how much has been written already on starting a blog and comparing the two most popular free blogging platforms.  We checked dozens of pages that came at the top, when searching for ' Wordpress vs Blogger' . In most of these, we found Wordpress being recommended as compared to Blogger.  But in most cases, the comparisons are misplaced, as we'll discuss later in this article. While we are well conversant with Wordpress, we use Blogger for our blogs, becasue we know its advantages over the free Wordpress platform for a commo...

Best practices, adapted from Google rating guide In the previous post in this series, we talked about the importance of these two qualities of websites for getting high search ratings from Google : (i) helping the user, and (ii) quality of web content. In the present post, we'd talk further about the quality aspects and also other factors that impact a website's standing. [In this 2-part series, we present the gems of search engine optimi z ation (SEO) that we have collected from the recently released Google's Search Quality Rating Guidelines . In trying to emphasi z e certain important points or to make it simple for common users, we have added our own interpretations and expressions.] Content quality Google raters will give good quality rating to a webpage or a website if it has sufficient amount of relevant content which must also be of high quality. Please note that the matter must be of high relevance to the topic; it must be in good quantity and upd...

UPDATE: Google has issued new guidelines in December 2019. We have published an updated post on ' Google Search Quality Rater Guidelines '.  Google has brought out its ' Search Quality Rating Guidelines ', first time since 2013. These are essentially for Evaluators who help in manually checking websites and queries for their quality, relevance, reputation etc that help in improving search experience. However, these guidelines also are very useful for website owners, bloggers and SEO experts.  Nothing can not be a more credible adviser than Google about what to do to improve quality and searchability of your website; so, we bring a 2-part series on what we found in Google guidelines that could be of great use to our visitors. That will save you the bother of going through the longish (160 pages, no more!) and slightly technical document and taking notes. It makes us feel especially humble to say that all these years, we have been saying what Google has deta...

Blogs have a dynamic life-cycle unlike static websites. They need updation, and therefore the blogger has to be on his toes - getting ideas for the next post, writing posts, finding relevant pictures, publishing the post also on other social media platforms or at least giving a link, and so on. When the blogger leaves this processing of blogging, the blog hibernates and eventually dies. There are occasions when a blogger thinks what he  publishes need not be shared with others or shared only with a few chosen ones, and he decides to make the blog private.  For some, it is not a pleasant change but they need to do it for some specific reasons such as keeping the blog off limit from their employer, discussing a controversial subject, working on a research that is not yet public etc. However, for most such communication, we feel that there are better ways than having a private blog. Sometimes, making the blog private is a knee-jerk reaction to not being able to maintain it...

Till Facebook and other social networking sites became the main platforms for social engagement on the web, blogs held sway. Blogs still have their standing as a valuable section of social media and will remain so for a long time to come. However, their importance for engagement has definitely gone down as the comments made on blogs are not instantly visible to follower or friends unless you have made put some widgets or notifications for this. Even then, the notification system is not as efficient as that of Facebook, Twitter or even Google Plus, LinkedIn and others . Another trend to share, in case you missed that. Many mainline media organizations the world over have reduced focus on commenting. Some have even stopped accepting comments on their news items and editorials. Some have reduced the prominence of blogs maintained on their platform. At the same time , all of them have put social sharing buttons for quick sharing of content. So comes the question, whether we should ...

Sometime back, we published a post on starting a free blog. In response, we got some queries that show that new bloggers often confuse between .blogger , .blogspot and Google blogs . So comes this post. Google is not only the biggest s earch engine, its bouquet has a lot many products and services. Among them is Blogger , a bogging platform, on which you can open any number of blogs, all for free! When you open a blog on Blogger , you get the blog's name with .blogspot at the end of it. For example, there is a blog with the name http://indiantopblogs.blogspot.com When you make a blog on Blogger , it get .blogspot. com as the ending. Interestingly, when you open this very blog in a country where Google has installed a server, you often get the same blog with the country ending! So don't get confused if in India, you get the blog in the above example as http://indiantopblogs .blogspot. in . In short, a ' Google blog' is the same as 'Blogger blog' or...

Updated in November 2020 Broken links and dead links are hyperlinks on webpages, which do not link to the destination. Broken links arise due to many reasons, the main ones being: The linked content's URL has been changed. The author of the website / blog typed the URL wrongly. The URL has gone private. The host server has gone bad temporarily (e.g. down for maintenance or attacked by a malware or overburdened due to sudden spike in traffic) or permanently. The URL has been blocked or removed due to its controversial or harmful nature. Links to user-generated content (e.g. answer to "SEO expert near my office") can generate temporary URLs that vanish immediately after use.  Webpages that need logging in cannot be browsed by non-logged-in users. Bad or broken or dead links get multiplied on blogs and many other CMSs by replicating the same URLs in many places. For example, a bad link might come up on the search pages and category pages in addition to the pag...

You have a Blogger (or Wordpress.com) free blog and now feel that you should rather have a traditional website, right?  You have two options, to convert the blog itself into a normal website  to create a new website and take your blog’s resources there. In the present post, we’d tell you how to convert the blog into a normal, simple, website that does not look like a blog. The procedure to redirect the blog to a new website is dealt with in this earlier post: Independent domain name, webhost and migration . Before we tell you how to convert the blog into a website, let’s spend a few minutes on why (or why not) make a blog look like a normal website . WHY SHOULD I CONVERT MY BLOG INTO A NORMAL WEBSITE? This blog has a simple page as the standalone homepage. A custom redirect (Settings> S earch P references...) makes it the homepage. There are some real and some perceived advantages of having a normal website rather than a blog. The main ones are: A...