10 Things to Check Before You Open a Free Blog

First of all, you need to sign up for a free blog. Some services accept only users from certain areas (e.g. from France, or Japan) and will not allow everybody to participate. Others demand a Google account or even an active Google Adsense account (a fine example is HubPages, although it's not a typical blogging service), which may be a major red flag for people who just want an occasional rant about their problems and sharing their view on the world or whatever.

Here is an example of my blog, initially opened in Hungary but deleted by the owner without warning after five posts: https://past-tense.mystrikingly.com/ (now already transferred).

I still don't know, what was the reason but I suspect writing in English was not welcomed.

I have also tried to open a blog in Japan where knowledge of hiragana was a must. I managed to register it (yes, I installed a driver for the Hiragana keyboard, bravo me) just to be banned right after my first post. While publishing in English was not specifically prohibited, I still broke some rules. That leads me to the next point.

All free blogging services apply numerous rules. There are so many, and they are written in so tricky language, a mere mortal can hardly understand everything. And they frequently change them. Apart from obvious rules (avoiding racism, pornography, promotion of drugs, etc.) some services also expect users to log in to their accounts at least once per month, not publish more than once in 24 hours, prohibit links to certain websites, etc.

I have lost three blogs because I forgot to log in and extend the usage for another 30 days. This service was on Joomla, a free and open-source service similar to WordPress. After a full year of usage, they decided to move their free blogs to Cloudflare where free users had to repeatedly extend their free accounts and after a few months I missed the date.

Fortunately, I had a solid backup, but the authority of the blogs, already supported by several backlinks and with constant traffic from Google, was lost forever.

This is an example of one of my deleted blogs, now moved to a new address: https://justcoolstuff.blog.fc2.com.

The rules mentioned above are not the only limitations you may encounter at free blogging services. Many of them are free only to a certain degree. They may, for instance, give you a chance to publish only five posts or publish only under the randomly created name. For instance, the address of your blog will be named 145thtg82 instead of myblog.

Several years ago I opened a blog: https://colors.site123.me/.

Last year I wanted to open another one and the option to choose your own name (as you can see above, I opted for name colors, because that's what I write about) is now not available anymore. This is their way to discourage spammers.

Some free blogging services are by default not indexed by search engines. This means you will never get traffic from Google or Bing. You can only expect visitors from the same blogging service and visitors who can get the URL of each of your posts (e.g. by subscribing or clicking the address on another service). For everybody else, your blog will be invisible. Such a service is Edublogs where I published a dozen articles before I noticed the notorious noindex tag in the code.

Before I moved the content to another service, I checked if they had the same policy. I examined several blogs and they seemed fine. But when I transferred the posts, they changed the rules. New users became noindexed, just like at Edublogs. For some reason, the profile page of the blog stayed indexed and I still use at least that to promote a few blogs on other addresses: https://profile.hatena.ne.jp/Artsandartists/profile.

I have no idea how long that will be, but the content has already moved to another service: https://ameblo.jp/artsandartists/.

Third time lucky?

The subject of authority on the internet is complex and I won't go into details, but in essence, authority is built with links pointing to the website. While hatena.ne.jp above is linked from half a million different websites (huge authority), my profile is linked from three websites only (just a novice). Yet some blogging services give you a headstart by using the authority coming from the main website like you can see at ameblo.jp above, where part of the initial authority transfers to my folder artsandartists right away.

Another example of such a service is https://plaza.rakuten.co.jp/didyouknow/.

(Wizzley is the same kind of beast, by the way, but we'll get to it later.)

This way you can almost immediately gain authority on search engines, which improves your chances to be indexed and visited.

But there's a catch. There's always a catch. You are not the only one who uses the specific service. With thousands of users search engines still may ignore your post, so you will have somehow to convince them you are worth indexing. This can be done with incoming links from other web addresses, quality content, promotion on social media, bookmarking tools,...

The look of your blog is not a deal breaker, but it's good to know that you have a chance to add a personal touch to the product. With some blogging services, you can create several pages and even subpages like with websitebuilders (example: https://oskar-herrfurth.weebly.com/), and with some you can't. And some just look prettier than others. It's always good to know what you can and can't do before you invest hours of work and months of waiting just to find out that something doesn't work with you.

I, for instance, would never use probably the most known free blogging service (it's actually a website builder) Wix despite its beautiful templates because it lacks in the area which is the most important for me - SEO friendliness.

I have already mentioned that some services are not indexed by search engines or don't allow you to choose the name of your blog. This is not the only possible limitation. Some, by default, also name your posts with codes, based on the date of publishing, not on the title of the post, which would be more user and search-engine friendly. The same is true for images, used in your posts. Most of my posts are full of images, and it's very important to me that you can name them as you wish. A large portion of my traffic comes through attractive images. If the service renames picture beautiful-image.jpg to 45488793.jpg, I'd rather not use it.

This is one example:

http://artyoushouldknow.canalblog.com/

Another important SEO issue many are not aware of is speed. If you intend to use a lot of images, they have to be small so they can load fast. Otherwise, the page will be slow, users will lose patience, and search engines will eventually worsen your position. Check the next example:

https://max-teschemacher.dorik.io/

It's a lovely website, easy to use, indexed by search engines, and free (with a limited amount of pages), but each image, for some reason, is bloated from the originally uploaded to ten-times larger size. A possibility to optimize your images is crucial. Lack of this option on Dorik makes their pages slow and Google doesn't like it. Google will never be fond of it. Such a blog can be useful just for a landing page of a small company (some kind of online business card) or a reference with data, interesting for a very specific group of people, who come there from other, more SEO-friendly addresses.

I have already written a full article about the nofollow tag. In short, it's useful if you have a lot of traffic and this traffic leads to a website where your visitors do something you want them to do (buy a product or download a calendar or something). If you write posts just to support main pages like https://mydreamweddingideas.com/, you should always opt for services without a nofollow tag.

This is another reason why I never liked Wix and why I stopped using otherwise search-engine very friendly Over-blog. Medium has nofollow links as well.

The best free blogging websites give their users a choice between using and ignoring a nofollow. WordPress and Blogspot are such cases.

Ownership of free blogging services is a huge issue as well. When Google bought Blogger and renamed it to Blogspot, it was already a well-established service and everybody expected to see it as a number one very soon. Instead of that, Google experimented with local domains and Google Plus, which almost destroyed it. Integration with Picassa was not working well, either. Then, they stopped experimenting and now Blogspot is number two in the area (after WordPress, of course) again.

Even worse scenarios happened to services like Blog (vanished without a trace), Posterous (bought by Twitter and shut down after a few months), Webs (I still don't know what happened to it), and so on and on.

My point? If you don't own the service, somebody else controls it. This means you have to be informed about the possible changes and make backups.

Some blogging services have great communities and some don't. Some bloggers like to participate with others and some not. This is all right and well, but search engines prefer active communities from the very beginning and I believe this will not change in the next years. Writing good blog posts is fine, but writing good posts with comments, likes, reblogs, and shares is better. This what Web 2.0 is all about, after all.

This is why Wizzley (not a typical blogging service) is still popular with search engines, although its popularity slowly vanishes due to the lack of fresh content. On the other hand, very popular services attract spammers who try to hijack the authority of the website which can lead to certain degradation in the eyes of the search engines or change of rules which can sometimes become almost paranoic like happened with Tumblr.

For some time it was a blogging service number three but now, with several changes, it's more like a bookmarking website.

Again, if you are looking for great communities (you'll still have to earn popularity) WordPress and Blogspot are better than anybody else.

Can You Add a Tip or Two?