Google Launches Blogger Overhaul
By WebProNews
Staff Writer
Article Date: 2004-05-10

Sporting a new design and many new member features, Google-owned Blogger.com has been relaunched.

Besides the new look, Blogger has added different user options in hope of making blogging easier and more web friendly. According to SearchEngineWatch, Google's primary focus since acquiring Blogger last year was to improve scalability and reliability. To assist in the reliability area, Google has added a fulltime support staff to Blogger.

The new features that has been added to Blogger was done in a effort to improve the Blogging experience as a result of user requests. Bloggers can now post by using email. An explanation from Blogger.com follows:

"Now you can also email your posts to Blogger. The subject line turns into a post title and the email itself becomes your post. So use your favorite email application to blog or use a wireless email enabled device to blog on location. All you have to do is create a Mail-to-Blogger address in the Email Settings and you're in business."
In addition to being able to update blogs by email, users and visitors can now post comments about blog posts. Comments can be turned on and off on a post by post basis. For instance, if you have an announcement you'd like to post that doesn't require feedback, turn the comments feature off, but if you have a topic that you would like to see discussed, leave them on.

Blogger.com now features profile pages. This was done in order to help users connect to like-minded individuals. Profiles feature "blogging stats, interests, and links to each user's blogs as well as recent posts. They also allow you too find other Blogger users who share your interests or location. Additionally, there are Profile Tags that will render a mini-version of your profile on your Main Page."

Another addition is the inclusion of permalink pages. Each post on your blog, besides being on the main page, will have its own page that uses a unique URL. This is where Google's influence is seen the most. Google's efforts were done to make blogs more crawlable, and therefore, more SERP friendly.

Blogger has also added a few more user updates. Members now have 33 blog templates to choose from when creating their blog site. The designers at Blogger.com added 26 new templates to give users a ton of variety. Blogger templates are designed based on cascading style sheets, making the pages created by bloggers more web standard compliant. These standards updates will also make the pages created by bloggers more search engine friendly.
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Google Launches Blogger Overhaul