During the past several months, Google has made multiple decisions with regards to page rank, penalizing those who sell text links, etc. and I really haven’t commented on it or even been impacted by it much. I could always sort of see their motivation, even if I didn’t agree with their actions. However, the latest move to not allow links in the Blogger comment area to blogs other than those on their platform really has me baffled. If you have a Blogger blog, this means that you can no longer visit the blogs of those who leave comments unless they are also on Blogger, and it very likely means that you will see fewer comments in general. That just stinks. What stinks even more is that they didn’t even feel the need to let their users know about it, and just quietly stuck the change in. That is terrible customer service and terrible business practice.
Is there anything you can do about it?
1. Switch to WordPress or some other blogging platform.
2. Install Haloscan to continue allowing external links in the comments.
3. Encourage your readers to leave the URL to their site in the body of the comment.
4. Complain to Google. I doubt that will do any good, but who knows?
Do you use Blogger? Does this move make you want to switch, or am I making too much of it? Tell me what you think.
::Update – Dec. 20::
The ability to use a non-Blogger URL when commenting has been restored. Good to know they are listening to their customers.