Jalaj P. Jha Technical & Miscellaneous Ramblings

Should you use a free blog?

This post of mine is inspired by Kian Ann's post Blogging for small business: Should you use a free blog?. Now before you read ahead I need to admit that I am not a SEO professional, nor into small business. It's only that I have a blog that's less than 100 days old and it's my experience with the same that I intend to share.

I got my blog account with Wordpress.com back in December 2006, with sole intention that I keep writing whatever I learn and which, I can refer later.

Amazingly I started getting hits from the very first day, whereas I never spread the word about it. Reason... my posts also found place on the tag pages of wordpress.com and it's subdomains for various languages, which diverted the traffic. I could not have received similar response if I had hosted my blog on my private space.

In the very first week I found tags pages from wordpress.com containing my posts with most of the first paragraph listed in google and other search engines. Now I started receiving traffic from visitors whose search terms matched with what I had in my posts which took them to wordpress later to mine blog.

It's less than 10 days since I started my blog and.. and... my Blog Stats is showing me Search Engine Terms following which visitors got to my blog. Hard to believe and a quick search in Google showed that indeed a few pages from my blog have been indexed by google... Now.. I never ever found such a quick acceptance from google without paying anything... I am sure if I had hosted elsewhere the result would have been totally different.

My earlier experience with googlebot was that most of crawling from a site happened every 30-35 days. Now I could see new pages from my blog appearing in google every 2-3 days. May be, Google has started fast crawling from blogs, which made this happen. With all these I got as much as 180 views in a single day. This may be small for most of pros but for me it's something that I never expected.

Now I don't know exactly when this happened but my blog suddenly got to Google PageRank 4, Thanks to Wordpress.com tag pages as I have never been linked from anywhere else.

If my blog achieved all this without ever making efforts for it, then I don't think that professional approach while hosting on free blogs will find any problem in rising to heights.

I got to read similar experiences from //engtech which are even more encouraging.

Hosting on free blogs as wordpress.com does have some shortcomings if you are hosting for free...

1. You have to live with a subdomain that doesn't look professional. Pay $10 extra in addition to what you paid for the domain and you have your blog running on reliable servers of wordpress, with advantage that you still remain a part of the wordpress.com community and your posts find place in tag pages as I mentioned earlier.

2. You cannot change look and feel of your site except for selecting from a large number of themes most of which support widgets providing you to add/modify/remove sidebar content as you links. A few themes also allow you to change the colors... Now that's a lot for something free... but still not satisfied (As with me... only two of the themes can show up my Codes properly on low resolutions or small window sizes). Just $15 and you can change looks of your site to anything you like, and as far as CSS can help you realize it.

As for me... I am glad that I hosted my blog on wordpress.com.

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