In a recent comment on a past post, Pam of Nerds Eye View wrote:
Another note I’d like to share – I read an article recently that emphatically stated you should host your own domain if your blog is a self-promotion tool. They liked using a yourblog.typepad.com or yourblog.blogger.com to using Hotmail for your business email. Your mention of publishing via FTP is the way to get around this.
In case I wasn’t clear, it is always the best situation when you host a blog/site under your own domain. Moreover, there is evidence that at least Google factors in the length of time you’ve had the domain registered, as well as the length of time you register a new domain for. So a domain registered in 1995 would carry a lot more weight than one registered in 2005. And a site registered today for 10 years carries more weight than once registered for just a year.
Unfortunately, though, registering a domain, editing the DNS record so it points to the right server, and putting up some HTML pages so a web site works is confusing for many people. That should not be a roadblock to creating a blog.
One can overcome the advantage of owning your own domain simply by creating good content on a regular basis. This is the factor that trumps everything. Focus on producing good content (detailed information that isn’t replicated on some other site). From that, work on getting people to read and link to it. If you can do that, then good search engine exposure will follow.
For example, we have several sites that are subdomains under booklocker.com and they get indexed just fine. We even have an author blog under our old system, which organized them as directories under a subdomain, and it ranks well. It is even recognized as a Forbes Best Of The Web pick.
So to put it simply, do a blog under your own domain if you can. (TypePad has a nice feature called Domain Mapping that gives you the benefits without the hassle and Blogger lets you FTP to other servers.) If you just can’t figure it out, don’t let that stop you. Blogs are still useful when hosted under a subdomain. And it is certainly a much, much better situation than doing nothing at all.
Thanks for this article (”Blogs are still useful…” For a couple of months now I’ve been doing a blog, “The Bethlehem Blog Times,” about life and politics in what people like to call “America’s Christmas City”–a title some of us use with some irony. I’ve been wondering whether it is worthwhile to go on like this, and you have convinced me that it is–at least for the time being.
Thanks again.