Blogger vs. Wordpress

While this post gives me the opportunity to link to the new home of Gwaendar's Altitis, the real subject is "moving your blog". Apparently over the last couple of weeks a couple of MMO bloggers moved from Blogger to Wordpress. One cited reason is that due to recent changes of the Blogger comment system, commenters can only link back to their own blogs if that blog is from Blogger. You can post comments under a non-Blogger nickname, but the field that linked that nickname to an URL was removed to prevent spam links. Wordpress doesn't have that restriction.

Now while I'm not happy about that change to Blogger either, I wouldn't move my blog because of that. The problem is that I have a Google pagerank of 5 with my Blogger front page, and about 60% of my traffic comes from search engines. And unlike Ogrebear, I found by Google analytics that the people who arrive at my blog via a search engine nearly exclusively were actually searching for the kind of information I'm providing. On my top 100 search terms there is only one objectionable one: "s i m s p o r n" (excuse the spaces, I just don't want to increase the number of hits I get on this), because of a piece I once wrote about the nonsense of blurring things that aren't even there. All others are about games or at least about computers, linking to the posts where I write about my hardware. If I moved my blog, my pagerank would disappear, and people wouldn't be able to find me, nor the information they were looking for in my blog.

So the only thing I can offer is pointing out again that paragraph 6 of my Terms of Service specifically allow you to sign your comments with a link back to your blog. It's a bit complicated, because you need to use proper HTML code to do it, but I recommend writing that code once into a text file and using copy & paste to sign with it.

I'm not expert enough to say whether Wordpress is really better than Blogger, I haven't even tried it. But if you are thinking of creating your own blog, I'd recommend to try the different possibilities first. If you move later, you'll inevitably lose part of your traffic.