The Honest Answer on Blogspot and SEO
Blogspot, Google's free Blogger platform, can rank. Pages hosted there get crawled quickly, load reasonably fast, cost nothing and require no maintenance, which is a genuinely attractive combination for a beginner. But "can rank" is different from "is a good long-term foundation". Blogspot limits your control over site architecture, technical output, schema markup, page speed optimisation and monetisation flexibility, and you never own the platform your audience lives on. For a hobby blog or a quick experiment, those trade-offs are acceptable. For a business that intends to build a durable organic channel, they become a ceiling you eventually hit and then have to escape through a migration you could have avoided.
How AAMAX.CO Helps You Choose and Build the Right Platform
At AAMAX.CO we regularly advise businesses that outgrew a free blogging platform and need to move without losing rankings. Our team plans the migration, maps every URL to its replacement, preserves authority through correct redirects, rebuilds the site on a modern stack with clean technical foundations, and then grows the content programme from there. We are a full service digital marketing company covering web development, digital marketing and SEO worldwide, so platform strategy, engineering and search work all happen under one roof rather than across three vendors. If you are unsure whether to stay on Blogspot or migrate, our search engine optimization team can assess your situation and give you a straight answer.
What Blogspot Genuinely Does Well
It would be unfair to dismiss the platform. Blogspot runs on Google infrastructure, so uptime and base performance are solid without any work from you. New posts are typically discovered and indexed quickly. It supports custom domains, which is essential and free, and it provides HTTPS automatically. You get editable meta descriptions, custom permalinks, robots header tags per post, alt text on images, a functional sitemap and native integration with Search Console and Analytics. Layout templates are responsive and mobile friendly by default. For someone with no budget and no technical skills who simply wants to publish and be found, that is a legitimately capable starting point.
The Limitations That Matter
The constraints appear as soon as you get serious. Template customisation relies on Blogger's own XML system, which makes advanced technical work awkward and fragile. Structured data beyond the basics requires hand-edited theme code. You cannot control server-level configuration, so redirect handling, header rules and caching behaviour are largely out of your hands. URL structure is rigid, typically forcing a dated hierarchy that is poor for evergreen content and difficult to reorganise. There is no proper taxonomy system beyond labels, no native way to build clean topic cluster architecture, and archive pages generate significant thin duplicate content. Add limited plugin extensibility, basic commerce capability and reduced monetisation flexibility and the ceiling becomes obvious.
The Ownership and Brand Problem
Beyond the technical issues sits a strategic one. On Blogspot you are building on rented ground. Terms of service can change, accounts can be suspended, and platform priorities are set by someone else. More subtly, a free blogging platform affects brand perception: prospects, journalists and potential partners read platform choice as a signal of seriousness. If your business depends on being seen as credible, the impression created by your web presence is part of your marketing, and that impression is worth more than the hosting fees you save.
How Blogspot Compares With Self-Hosted Options
A self-hosted platform gives you complete control over URL structure, taxonomy, schema, caching, image optimisation and integrations, plus full ownership of your data and audience. It also lets you build proper pillar and cluster architecture, run advanced internal linking, implement custom performance budgets and add commerce or lead generation functionality without fighting the system. The cost is hosting, maintenance and a modest amount of technical responsibility. For any site expected to become a meaningful acquisition channel, that cost is trivially recovered. Blogspot remains fine for personal projects; it is rarely the right home for a growing business.
Getting the Most From Blogspot If You Stay
If you have decided to remain on the platform, optimise it properly. Connect a custom domain immediately and enforce HTTPS redirection. Enable search description fields and write unique descriptions for every post. Set custom permalinks with clean keyword-focused slugs instead of accepting auto-generated ones. Apply noindex to archive and label pages to reduce duplication. Compress images before upload and always add descriptive alt text. Edit the theme to include Article and BreadcrumbList JSON-LD. Strip unnecessary widgets and third-party scripts that damage load time. Build strong internal linking manually between related posts, and keep publishing genuinely useful content, because on a constrained platform content quality carries even more of the weight.
Planning a Migration Without Losing Rankings
When you do outgrow Blogspot, migrate carefully. Export all content, rebuild it on the new platform with improved structure, then map every old URL to its new equivalent with permanent redirects. Preserve titles and internal links, submit a fresh sitemap, and monitor Search Console coverage and query performance daily for the first month. Expect a short dip followed by recovery and usually improvement, because you have removed the technical limitations that were holding you back. Pairing the migration with a proper content and digital marketing push turns a defensive move into a growth moment.
The Verdict
Blogspot is good enough to rank and not good enough to build a business on. Use it to test an idea, learn publishing habits or run a personal project. Move to an owned platform the moment search traffic becomes commercially important, because every month you delay adds URLs to the eventual migration. If you want that decision made with data and executed without risk, hire AAMAX.CO for GEO services and expert platform migration support.
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