October 13, 2008 by Kevin O'Keefe

Why Blogger, WordPress, and TypePad domains are no good for your law blog

Krishna De, a brand engagement and social media communications expert, guest posts at Business Blog Consulting on why Blogger, WordPress and TypePad domains are no good for business blogging.

While doing a recent social media workshop, De found it heartening to see that so many attendees were were blogging about their business. However, she became pretty disheartened when she found most of those blogs had been developed on a platform such as Blogger or Wordpress.com.

    Investing a little in implementing a business blog that is hosted on your website not only makes you look like you take business blogging seriously as part of your online marketing strategy, it also means that every link to your great content is a link to your website.

    That way you will be sure to benefit even more from your online content strategy buildng links to your business blog.

It's not just a small business issue. Just like I find large large law firms skimping by on these domains, De finds large businesses making the same mistake.

A colleague of mine on a social media working group is employed as an online expert for an online insurance company, and their external consultant had advised them to develop a business blog using Wordpress.com.

I’ve even seen Marketing Directors of major companies who should know more about branding than most use a blog that is detracting from their personal brand online as they are using Blogger.

Online personal branding experts even look to encourage people to use Typepad.com as a blog platform - whilst it’s a great blogging platform that I use and recommend, if you also have a website, a Typepad blog is not going to help you with your link building and search engine optimisation strategy which is becoming even more critical as few people now move beyond page 1 of Google when searching and researching online. What do they do if they can not find what they are looking for online on the first page of their search? They change the words they are using to search with of course.

There are many lawyers and firms who have figured out how to using domain mapping and development work-arounds to use these blog publishing platforms on their own domain. As long as they have covered the other bases of blogging effectively, such lawyers may be okay.

But I see a ton of law blogs on subdomains of TypePad, WordPress, and Blogspot. See for example West Virginia Family Law Blog (WordPress), Divorce Law Journal (TypePad), Florida Divorce & Family Law Blog (Blogger's Blogspot).

As De says '[I]f you are going to invest in business blogging, be good to yourself… don’t have all those wonderful incoming links to your great content go to a blog that is not hosted by you.'

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June 12, 2008 by Kevin O'Keefe

More reason not to use Blogger or Blogspot for your law blog

More reason not to use Google's free Blogger blog service for your law blogs comes from Loren Baker, Editor of the Search Engine Journal.

As Loren explains, if you have a Blogger blog, this could happen to your blog.

Law Blogs Blogger

How? Look at Google's terms of service.

Google may, in its sole discretion, at any time and for any reason, terminate the Service, terminate this Agreement, or suspend or terminate your account. In the event of termination, your account will be disabled and you may not be granted access to your account or any files or other content contained in your account although residual copies of information may remain in our system for some time for back-up purposes.

There are a significant number of lawyers using Google’s Blogger platform and Google’s Blogspot hosting for their blog. As Loren says using the Blogger-Blogspot combination 'takes away the heart of your blog and hands it over to Google. They control your blog, not you.'

What's especially surprising is that it's pretty unlikely these same lawyers would advise their clients to hand over their intellectual capital and marketing materials to a third party and forego all control.

Look at some of the other provisions in the Blogger Terms of Service. Provisions a lawyer would never agree to any contract they would negotiate.

  • General Practices Regarding Use and Storage. You agree that Google has no responsibility or liability for the deletion of, or the failure to store or to transmit, any Content and other communications maintained by the Service. Google retains the right to create limits on use and storage at our sole discretion at any time with or without notice.
  • Google also reserves the right to access, read, preserve, and disclose any information as it reasonably believes is necessary to (a) satisfy any applicable law, regulation, legal process or governmental request, (b) enforce this Agreement, including investigation of potential violations hereof, (c) detect, prevent, or otherwise address fraud, security or technical issues, (d) respond to user support requests, or (e) protect the rights, property or safety of Google, its users and the public.
  • By submitting, posting or displaying Content on or through Google services which are intended to be available to the members of the public, you grant Google a worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free license to reproduce, publish and distribute such Content on Google services for the purpose of displaying and distributing Google services. Google furthermore reserves the right to refuse to accept, post, display or transmit any Content in its sole discretion.

Really going to advise your law firm to take these kind of risks? I can tell you that I haven't talked to many, if any, lawyers who would agree to those terms if we used them in a LexBlog agreement.

But Hey, it's free. ;)

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