Wednesday, July 02, 2008

Evil noindex tag

Ever since I switched to the new blogger template I have noticed a huge drop in my daily traffic. I was concerned, but I thought it could have been related to my lessening focus on World of Warcraft. Also, I don't really barrage my site with ads and the links we're still working so I've just been ignoring the problem. However, a friend of mine recently told me he couldn't find my blog directly listed on any search engines. I checked and sure enough only links to my blog through other websites were showing up. All of sudden it was a matter of honor since I couldn't let WoWInsider be the first site to show up when someone typed Relmstein into Google.

The problem was of course something simple and stupid that most people fixed right away, a year ago! When blogger first started using XML templates it looks like there was a little bug which would insert the nofollow and noindex tags. This of course puts a damper on sites getting into any of the search engines. If anyone else has this problem you just have to delete the tags from your template's code. The whole mess has made me think again about switching to wordpress, but I'm pretty lazy. Anyways was just wondering if anyone out in blogsphere had a good comparison between using wordpress and blogger.

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

I used to have a personal blog on Blogger & recently started a WoW blog on wordpress...and I've already given up on wordpress & considering starting fresh on Blogger. My main issue is just the ease of use, once youve grown used to Blogger, Wordpress takes alot of work. Although I'm sure you're alot better at HTML than I am, so maybe you won't have any problems. No harm in making a test blog to check out Wordpress.

Anonymous said...

I actually first heard about your blog on the WoW Insider radio show, and it took me a while to find it (google only lead to WowInsider like you mentioned).

Anonymous said...

Depends how serious you are. Signing up with a hosting company for ~$6/mo which includes your domain name fee and having a hosted Wordpress site allows you to do so much more than either blogger or a wordpress.com site, but it takes somewhat more commitment.

As to blogger vs. wordpress.com, I cannot compare them since I used both as early experiments only.

Relmstein said...

Well I guess I will stick to blogger then since my site is once again showing up in search engines. Google already has 150 posts of mine indexed and it makes me wonder just how many I've put out there over the years.

Anyways if I ever get some more free time I might start looking in Wordpress since I would like my blog to look a little more professional.