Putting Together Blogger and Google+
From the introduction of Google+ in social networking sphere, it has been always been under speculation about it’s future. Questions haunting Bloggers is- “will Google sunset Blogger in favor of Google+” ? Some activists like +Mike Elgan (having more than 2 Million followers) raises the concern over existence of blogger in the era of google+. W hen Google+ has so much to offer, why not to switch to Google+ as permanent blogging platform and letting blogger just fade away.
But some die hard blogger fan like me yet argue this fact. Blogger has its own existence. Google has loaded Google+ with much features to offer a blogging platform but killing blogger is not its business. Blogger has some of it’s unique features which are non-disputable everywhere:
- Complete brand control and design
- Custom top level domain support
- Paid advertising
- Anonymous commenting
- Content with a longer lifespan (Google+ content has a lifespan) and is indexed by non-Google search engines
- Better handling of long-form content and highly-formatted content
- Support for data outside linear date posts (static pages, label categories)
- External gadgets and JQuery support.
Many a times bloggers ask me a question – ” why to use google+ and blogger together” ? This question summarizes the dispute to one line: blogger and google+ both are to complement each other.
I always suggest to complement blogger page with a google+ badge. Create your official or personal google+ page. The page is then linked to Blogger page, taking advantage of the Google+ functional link in Blogger. This cross linking gives you few advantages: combined with the Google+ Page gadget in Blogger it adds rel=publisher data, adds a social follow functionality (similar to Facebook’s Like Box), asks for auto-sharing when you submit your post, and in Google+ allows you to communicate with people. This is a major process to publicize your blog.
In this manner a Google+ page directs a lot of traffic to your blog, as well as short and long-term value to the linked blog post. In blogger blog post, the traffic audience keeps tracking for a long time, re-sharing in future and generating more and more traffic. The images are indexed to search engines quickly with the help of google+. It might also get shared to Pinterest, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, etc.
Unlike in Blogger, where post are visible life long, generating views lifelong, Google+ post are susceptible to your posting frequency. It fades away after sometime from both in our own Profile/Feed, but also in the Google+ search. To get a lifelong visibility Blogger is preferred with Google+ as assisting tool to generate views.
