Is WordPress or Blogger better for SEO?

Matt's answer:

Today’s question comes from Vicki, regarding how to start a blog.

Vicki asks, I’ve used Blogger for three years, but now everyone tells me that WordPress is superior for SEO. After scouring many sites, I’ve been unable to find the SEO advantages to using Blogger– are there any?

Great question. Comparing and contrasting. I work for a company that provides Blogger. On my personal blog, I use WordPress. So I can see the advantages on both sides. On one hand, Blogger is very simple to get started. It’s very easy, and it’s in the cloud. You don’t need to download and install any software yourself. And for better or for worse, if you install software yourself, you’re usually not patching it, so it’s easier to get hacked. So if you just want to do casual blogging, if you’re just starting out, Blogger is fantastic. WordPress has a lot of flexibility. You can customize everything.

In particular, you can say: I want my post to be having this specific URL, and you can choose those words. At least back in the day with Blogger, when you wrote your post, whatever you wrote would determine what the URL would be, and you didn’t have the ability to individually control that. So they both have pros and cons.

Both can work very well in terms of ranking well for search engines. If you get good links and if you have great content, it’s absolutely the case that you can rank well on both Blogger and on WordPress. Blogger is probably a little simpler to start out, and it’s good in the fact that, since it’s in the cloud, you don’t need to worry about getting hacked. WordPress is maybe a little more effort, because you can configure it yourself. But ultimately, it gives you more flexibility and maybe a little bit more power.

So there’s a lot of good pros and cons. Whichever one you feel most comfortable with, I would give it a try.

And if one has a better user experience, or you just feel like one meshes with the way that you like to write a little bit better, that’s the one that I’d go with. And then eventually over time, you can always– I think both have ways where you can import and export your posts. So it’s not like you’re necessarily locked in forever.

But definitely try them both out, because both can work very well in terms of SEO.

by Matt Cutts - Google's Head of Search Quality Team

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