Blogger Review

PROS / The suite of Google products is directly linked to your blog.

CONS / There are no options for word or IP banning.

VERDICT / Blogger is a great introductory blog service and has enough features to satisfy blog veterans.

One of the most popular blog services for prospective blog writers looking to post for free is Blogger. In the years that Google has owned this blog platform, it has been enriched with features, and it is compatible with the other services on Google's dashboard of products. It's never a bad thing to write content on a blog site owned by the largest search engine if you want new readers to find your posts. It's incredibly easy to sign up as a Google ad affiliate and directly apply those codes to your blog interface.

Blogger 

Blogger is easy enough for an amateur blogger, but it has enough great design tools, widgets and promotion features to be one of the top services. With this service, you can start posting immediately using a basic template or create your own customizable theme. For these reasons and more, Blogger is the Top Ten Reviews Bronze Award winner for blog services.

Design Tools

Blogger's blog hosting platform allows you to access open-source blogs, import blog templates or simply use a standard template. Unlike many free blog services, Blogger lets you change the HTML code in your templates to customize your blog. Additionally, since Blogger is so preferred, countless free open-source templates are available from other sites, so your template choices are endless.

The draft page of this service looks very similar to a typical Word document. It has a clean design that doesn't overwhelm you with features or widgets. The basic text editor uses nearly double the tools that most other blog platforms have. One key feature we love is the addition of spell-check in this toolbar. The obvious need for spell-check makes you wonder why it isn't standard in many competing services. Blogger takes care of the code-minded out there as well with a basic HTML editor.

On the right-hand column are the post setting tools. They allow you to add labels and tags for better archiving; you can schedule when your posts are published and moderate reader comments to an extent.

Feature Management

Blogger's automatic alignment with Google's other products helps it out a great deal. Whether you are a member of Google Plus or not, your blog links to it. You have the chance to automatically share every blog post as soon as it's published, or to be asked to share it every time you complete a post.

In your blog settings, you can add multiple authors and designate their roles. You can also set your blog to public, private to approved readers or private to only the blog authors as a way to message each other. You can set your comment moderation features so that you get an email asking for your approval any time you receive a new comment. However, that is Blogger's only way to eliminate spam. It does not offer the option to ban certain words or IP numbers.

Promotion

The best promotional aspect of Blogger is the fact that Google owns it, which means your blog is automatically submitted to Google's blog directory. However, Blogger offers few tracking options. In order to get visitor counts or something more than comments, you have to add a widget or some kind of third-party application that tracks traffic for you. You can resolve that problem with the download of Google Analytics.

Help & Support

Blogger offers more support than most free blog services do. It has FAQs, tutorials, user forums and a searchable knowledgebase. In addition, since Blogger is so popular, you can also find all kinds of advice online from third-party sources.

Summary

Blogger is a great blog tool. It offers open-source blogs and automatically submits your blog to one of the best search engines available. It is perfect for casual and semi-professional bloggers. The service doesn't do much to block spam or harmful spammers, but otherwise, the features are exactly what you need to run a solid personal blog.