Is A Free Blog Host As Effective As Owning Your Own Domain Name?
I recently had a client ask me if setting up a blog on WordPress.com or Blogger.com is as effective as owning your own domain name. He wanted to set up a blog on the free blog post and said that it would get crawled faster. True. It would. But when it comes to blogging you have to look at the long-term benefits. Here are the long-term benefits that your own domain name provides that free blog hosts don’t:
- You own the real estate. It’s always better to own the real estate than to rent it. Free blog hosts are like half way houses. You don’t have to pay rent, but you have none of the benefits of ownership. Eventually, you’ll outstay your welcome.
There are two primary reasons why free blog hosts are undesirable. Since they’re free, a lot of spammers use them. That’s make it a bad neighborhood. By owning your own domain name, you can ensure that your site sits on a server where it will gain a positive reputation. Secondly, if the blog host is shut down or goes out of business, or the owner changes the business model of the site, then you’ll lose your blog. You’ll have to move all the content to another location or lose it. - The long-term SEO is more rewarding. While you can build links from a free blog host, you should seriously consider getting your own domain name for that purpose. Since you own the real estate and the content, you have more control (as stated above), but you can also tweak your software and site template more easily to conform to modern SEO conventions.
- It’s not that expensive. Sure, you have to pay for the domain name ($10/year) and the hosting, but you are more likely to rank for your key phrases if your content is well optimized over the long run. If you are writing a hobby blog then a free host may be perfect for you, but for business I’d strongly recommend your own domain name.
You can always augment your own blog with a WordPress.com or Blogger.com blog. The free web hosts shouldn’t be your first approach, but they work great as support tools. Just don’t copy/paste your blog content from one blog to another as you’ll run into duplicate content issues.
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