dasBlog and Search Engines

So I’ve made the switch from Blogger to dasBlog for at least a few main reasons:

  • dasBlog supports RSS feeds
  • dasBlog has better monitoring and reporting features
  • dasBlog will ping more RSS aggregators
  • dasBlog supports CAPTCHA-protected comments (less comment spam)
  • dasBlog has auto trackback
  • dasBlog runs on my machine, so I can monkey with it if I want to
  • dasBlog has categories, so I can group my posts for users’ benefit. Useful for people who blog about a lot of different things.

However, I’ve noticed that dasBlog isn’t as good as Blogger for search engines. For example:

  • dasBlog’s links aren’t as spider friendly. They have some SEO-friendly (i..e no querystrings) URLs, but they delimit the words with spaces instead of dashes. And not all links are SEO-friendly.
  • dasBlog does’t have as many links to archived content. It seems like the only content a spider could get to is content from the current month. Older posts are seemingly only accessible via a javascript method call.
  • dasBlog has a bunch of crap in the HTML. ASP.NET view state, inline CSS, inline javascript — just a lot of stuff that is i nthe HTML (especially at the top) that has nothing to do with the content. I know that spiders will ignore a lot of that stuff, but it’s still not cool.

I’ll be fooling with the HTML in the next few weeks … get the site all looking the same, improve the SEO aspect. Stay tuned for whether it’s a success or dismal failure. 😉

0

Written by Ben Strackany -- July 17, 2005

Ben worked for a variety of tech startups in Chicago before moving to Portland and starting DevelopmentNow in 2005. When he's not herding cats, stirring pots, and taking names, he enjoys drinking coffee while irritating the studio audience with bad puns.