Have you noticed that Blogger has changed its comment form so that you have to either sign in with a gmail address or as anonymous? If the blog owner does not allow anonymous comments you cannot comment at all; unless you have a gmail address. A link to a gmail address not attached to a Blogger account leads to a ‘Profile Not Found’ page with the message “The Blogger Profile you requested cannot be displayed. Many Blogger users have not yet elected to publicly share their Profile“. This mistakenly assumes that all those who comment are bloggers themselves!
More significantly for bloggers:
Unless you use blogspot Blogger, your blog url is not linked to. This is in addition to the fact that blogspot default linking is set to nofollow; which means that links were not counted for pagerank purposes anyway. Google is penalizing bloggers once again, after so recently downgrading pagerank for those using paid for links. I am really peeved that my freedom in using the internet is being eroded once again and do not like to be controlled in this way.
This move goes against the basic nature of blogging, that of bloggers linking to each other in the spirit of give and take and community building. How can you build up a relationship with another blogger if you do not know where to find them. This move is bound to reduce the amount of commenting on Blogger blogs. Therefore ALL bloggers are being disadvantaged – both blogspot and non blogspot users.
What can we bloggers do about this? I have some suggestions:
- Non blogspot bloggers can leave their blog url in the nickname field of the Blogger comments form. The usual nickname could be used to sign off the comment itself. I prefer this solution to leaving the url in the body of the comment as, under normal circumstances, this is considered spammy.
- Blogspot bloggers can change their comment form message, suggesting that non blogspot users leave their url as their nickname or in the body of the message. To do this go into the Settings/Comments area of your dashboard. Add your message to the ‘Comments Form Message’ section. Example:
- Use Haloscan , which replaces the blogspot comment system. Haloscan allows external linking as well as having a trackback feature which is missing from Blogger. This is not an ideal solution as older comments are not retained by Haloscan but it is better than nothing.
- All bloggers, whether Blogger users or not, contact blogspot using their suggestion form and ask them to allow users to leave their blog url in the comments form once again.
- If like me you have left blogspot for another blogging platform, sign up for another gmail account in case you want to leave messages on blogs that do not allow anonymous comments. This will prevent your email address leaving a link back to your old bloggger blog.
- Blogspot users could move to another blogging platform. Wordpress.com for example allows you to import all your posts and comments from blogspot. Either that or consider using your own domain. There are many other reasons to move away from blogspot. You can see my own reasons here Reasons I moved from blogspot Blogger.
- Set up a Blogger blog with one post which links to your non blogger blog. I am sure spammers will be doing this – is Google encouraging spam?? If you have a blogspot address that you do not want to link to, sign up for a new gmail account and new blogspot address to match. Consider using an email address such as yourwebname.dotcom@gmail.com to further publicize your blog name. You can divert any mail to this account to your email address of choice in gmail Settings/Forwarding and POP/IMAP/Forward a copy of incoming mail to .. This will save you having to login to this gmail account to retrieve your mail.
- Post about this issue yourself to register your disapproval.
If anyone is now considering a move to Wordpress and need more help and information than I have given so far in this blog, please leave a comment or contact me via my comment form. I will either write posts myself or point you in the right direction to find clear instructions.
Google’s power is starting to concern me and I am going to find alternatives to their services, even though this may not be so convenient. Do you think I am overreacting here or justified in my concern?
If anyone can think of any other solutions to this recent violation of our rights as bloggers, please let me know.
Update:
Blogger users could use the Intense Debate comment system to replace Blogger’s. I have seen this in place on a couple of blogs and the option is still there to enter a blog url when leaving a comment.
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