Wordpress vs Blogger

Wordpress’s biggest competitor is called Blogger, owned by Google this blogging platform became popular virtually overnight, there are several key differences when it comes to these two blogging platforms so don’t be fooled by Google’s/Blogger fame in the blogsphere.  A quick comparison of both sites Wordpress.org vs Blogger.com shows you why blogger is preferred by newbies.  Blogger provides a clean sign up interface and basically takes users step by step through the entire blog-creating process which is good but something had to be sacrificed in order to keep things simple (you will know what I mean below)

Wordpress.org on the other hand seems to be more complex for new bloggers simply because there are more options, for instance Wordpress offers the script in a .zip or .tar file which has to be installed in your server in order for it to work, you also have the option of creating a blog hosted in Wordpress’s hosting account.  With this last option users can do pretty much the same things they can in Blogger’s hosted environment.  Wordpress’s home page also offers direct access to several areas within the site which might confuse new users.

Now that we have laid out some differences in the table lets get down to business and talk about the main differences, pros and cons of each blogging platform.

Ease of Use and Simplicity:

Blogger is clearly the most simple blogging platform to use compared to Wordpress, even if you were to know nothing about blogging a quick visit to the site will tech you pretty much everything you need to get things going, there are other customizable areas which might take a little work on your part but the interface organizes it quite nicely.  Wordpress is also easy to use once you have basic notion of how to create a MySQL database and how to connect it to the script, from there everything is pretty much done.

Customization:

In this area Wordpress comes on top, the fact that you are able to take the script and host it in your own server using your very own domain is good enough to come on top but what really sets Wordpress apart are the many options the user has as far as plugins, widgets and themes, in fact the Wordpress community has perhaps the largest pool of applications for this blogging platform.

Hosting Options:

Hosting Blogger in your own domain is possible, however it is not very convenient, in order to do so you have to create an FTP account in your hosting account and enter these details in your Blogger admin area, easy enough right? The only problem this process has is that your blog needs to be republished every time you change anything.  The dynamic nature of Wordpress which can be hosted anywhere makes it very convenient in this aspect.

Blogger’s SEO Value:

This particular topic has been widely debated among savvy webmasters, some argue that because blogger is owned by Google, the optimization of the platform should be better than Wordpress’s, but what is normally left out of the conversation is that blogger accounts are mostly hosted on Blogger’s servers using a subdomain of the site, since Blogger itself has great page rank and it’s crawled very often new blogs are discovered and indexed in record time, the same would happen if you were to host your Wordpress blog using their hosting and subdomain.  Hosting Wordpress in your own server will require some patience since the site will not be crawled as fast as if it were hosted under a high PR domain.

Besides hosting, Wordpress has several plugins which are meant to organically optimize your blog, these plugins often change many on page factors in order to give a better chance to your blog to rank high in the SERPs, some changes are: search engine friendly permalinks, optimized meta-tags, robots.txt to avoid search engine spiders from crawling folders which may have duplicate content, etc.