Tag Archives: Blogspot

Best practices for reviewing products you’ve received for free

Editor's note: This post was cross posted from the Google Webmaster Central Blog.

As a form of online marketing, some companies today will send bloggers free products to review or give away in return for a mention in a blogpost. Whether you’re the company supplying the product or the blogger writing the post, below are a few best practices to ensure that this content is both useful to users and compliant with Google Webmaster Guidelines.

  1. Use the nofollow tag where appropriate

    Links that pass PageRank in exchange for goods or services are against Google guidelines on link schemes. Companies sometimes urge bloggers to link back to:
    1. the company’s site
    2. the company’s social media accounts
    3. an online merchant’s page that sells the product
    4. a review service’s page featuring reviews of the product
    5. the company’s mobile app on an app store

Bloggers should use the nofollow tag on all such links because these links didn’t come about organically (i.e., the links wouldn’t exist if the company hadn’t offered to provide a free good or service in exchange for a link). Companies, or the marketing firms they’re working with, can do their part by reminding bloggers to use nofollow on these links.

  1. Disclose the relationship

    Users want to know when they’re viewing sponsored content. Also, there are laws in some countries that make disclosure of sponsorship mandatory. A disclosure can appear anywhere in the post; however, the most useful placement is at the top in case users don’t read the entire post.
  2. Create compelling, unique content

    The most successful blogs offer their visitors a compelling reason to come back. If you're a blogger you might try to become the go-to source of information in your topic area, cover a useful niche that few others are looking at, or provide exclusive content that only you can create due to your unique expertise or resources.

For more information, please drop by our Google Webmaster Central Help Forum.

Posted by the Google Webspam Team

Source: Blogger Buzz


An update on Google Friend Connect

In 2011, we announced the retirement of Google Friend Connect for all non-Blogger sites. We made an exception for Blogger to give readers an easy way to follow blogs using a variety of accounts. Yet over time, we’ve seen that most people sign into Friend Connect with a Google Account. So, in an effort to streamline, in the next few weeks we’ll be making some changes that will eventually require readers to have a Google Account to sign into Friend Connect and follow blogs.


As part of this plan, starting the week of January 11, we’ll remove the ability for people with Twitter, Yahoo, Orkut or other OpenId providers to sign in to Google Friend Connect and follow blogs. At the same time, we’ll remove non-Google Account profiles so you may see a decrease in your blog follower count.


We encourage you to tell affected readers (perhaps via a blog post), that if they use a non-Google Account to follow your blog, they need to sign up for a Google Account, and re-follow your blog. With a Google Account, they’ll get blogs added to their Reading List, making it easier for them to see the latest posts and activity of the blogs they follow.

We know how important followers are to all bloggers, but we believe this change will improve the experience for both you and your readers.

Posted by Michael Goddard, Software Engineer

Source: Blogger Buzz


Highlight the posts that matter the most

As bloggers, we all know how important it is to post frequently in order to encourage readers to come back. Of course, the more you post, the more quickly your posts slip down into the archives, making it harder for your readers to discover everything you’ve posted that they might be interested in.

To help make it easier to showcase the posts you want your readers to see, we’ve created a new gadget called Featured Post. With Featured Post, you can choose posts you’ve shared on your blog and highlight them wherever you’d like.


Whether you’d like to re-share that delicious holiday recipe from a few years back, spotlight a can’t-miss promotion you’re running, or just revive something quirky from the archives, the Featured Post gadget is a simple way to show off the content that matters most.

To try it, just head to your Layout tab, add a gadget, and select ‘Featured Post’. You’ll be able to place the gadget wherever you’d like on your blog and then choose the post you’d like to show. If you’d like to highlight something new, you can change the post you feature at any time.

Happy blogging!

Posted by Guy Ronen, Product Manager

Source: Blogger Buzz


HTTPS support coming to Blogspot

This morning we posted an update about Blogspot to Google’s Security Blog https://googleonlinesecurity.blogspot.com/2015/09/https-support-coming-to-blogspot.html.

Since 2008, we've worked to encrypt the connections between our users and Google servers. Over the years we've announced that Search, Gmail, Drive, and many other products have encrypted connections by default, and most recently, we've made a similar announcement for our ads products.

In this same vein, today we're expanding on the HTTPS Everywhere mission and beginning an initial rollout of HTTPS support for Blogspot. HTTPS is a cornerstone of internet security as it provides several important benefits: it makes it harder for bad actors to steal information or track the activities of blog authors and visitors, it helps check that visitors open the correct website and aren’t being redirected to a malicious location, and it helps detect if a bad actor tries to change any data sent from Blogger to a blog visitor.

While this initial rollout won’t support all of our Blogger users, we wanted to take the first step to make HTTPS available for Blogspot; for those users who want to try it early.

We’re rolling this out gradually and Blogspot authors interested in enabling HTTPS support can begin opting-in today. Simply log into https://www.blogger.com, click on the blog you’d like to make HTTPS enabled, navigate to the Settings page, and select "yes" for "HTTPS Availability". Unfortunately, blogs with custom domains are not supported in this first version.
Once enabled, your blog will become accessible over both HTTP and HTTPS connections. Blogspot authors should be aware that if they choose to encrypt at this time, some of the current functionality of their blog may not work over HTTPS. This can be a result of template, gadgets, and blog post content, and is often caused by mixed content errors, some of which may be fixable by the author themselves.

We’ll also be moving some of our own blogs over to HTTPS gradually, beginning with the Official Google Blog and the Google Online Security Blog.

For the Blogspot authors who try this out - we’re interested to hear your feedback while we continue to improve this feature and its capabilities! For more information, visit our Help Center.

Posted by Jo-el van Bergen, Software Engineer, Security.

Source: Blogger Buzz


Even more expansions to the Blogger template language

Recently we introduced a new set of expressions to the Blogger templating language, designed to let you customize the HTML of each post and page on your blog. We’ve gotten great feedback on them, so we figured we'd offer even more.

Now you can try out new tags, like:

  • b:elseif for a simpler multiple-case b:if branch.
  • b:switch and b:case for succinctly handling several possible cases of a variable.
  • b:eval for evaluation of more complex expressions involving data variables.
  • b:with for creating a nicer variable alias for a calculated value.

An example of customizing the markup of your blog, using the new switch tags.


If you’d like to customize your blog's template using these tags and expressions, just head to the dashboard under Settings > Template > Edit HTML. To see the full specs of the new tags or learn more, check out the help article.

Happy Templating!

Posted by Luke Bjerring, Software Engineer

Source: Blogger Buzz


Adding new expressions to Blogger templates

Blogger's template engine is powered by a flexible editing language, consisting of a set of Widget Tags which use expressions to conditionally change the output HTML for each post and page on your blog.

Using these expressions, you can customize the HTML output of your blog, to adjust the look and feel. You could, for example, show an image behind the header, but only on the homepage. Or add a flower icon, next to a post's title, if the post has the 'Flower' label.

You can customize your blog's template under Settings > Template > Edit HTML.



You can customize your template’s markup, to change the look and feel of your blog.


Previously, the expressions in Blogger's templates could
  • Add or concatenate values with +
  • Subtract values with -
  • Check for equality with != and ==
  • Compare values with <, >, <= and >=

Now, support has been added for many more expression operators, including:
  • Inversion of true/false values with !/not e.g. <b:if cond='!data:post.allowComments'>...
  • Picking between 2 values with ?: e.g. <a expr:class='data:post.allowComments ? "comments" : "no-comments"' ...
  • Checking if a value is a member of a set or array, with in/contains e.g. <b:if cond='data:blog.pageType in {"index", "archive"}'>...
  • Combining multiple conditions with and/or e.g. <b:if cond='data:blog.pageType == "index" and data:post.allowComments'>...
  • Changing the order of operations with () e.g. <div expr:style='"max-width: " + (data:width + 10) + "px;"'>...

For a full specification of the new operators, see the help article.
Happy Templating!


Posted by Luke Bjerring, Software Engineer

Source: Blogger Buzz


Custom domains for your blog made easy

You invest a lot of time in your blog, making sure it fits your personal brand and style. And a big part of making it your own comes from what you call it and where it lives. Blogger has long let you host your blog on a custom domain, so that you can give it any URL you choose. To make that process even easier, starting today, we’re integrating Blogger directly with Google Domains, allowing you to purchase a custom domain for your blog right from Blogger with just a few clicks.

If your blog is itching for a new home, you can grab one via Google Domains by popping open Blogger and heading to the Publishing section of your blog’s Settings tab.




If you purchase a new domain from Google Domains, it’s also easy to create a new blog for that domain right there.



Interested in learning more about Google Domains? Read on.

Happy blogging!

Posted by Marc Ridey, Software Engineer

Source: Blogger Buzz


Making it easier to manage pages on your blog

Adding pages to your blog can be a great way to organize content - like ‘About me’ or ‘Advertise’ sections. To make managing pages easier, we redesigned the ‘Pages’ tab in the Blogger dashboard to make it look and feel more like something you’re already familiar with: managing posts.


With the new design, you can:

  • view important details about your pages like view count and comments
  • manage multiple pages at once with new selection tools
  • easily see whether pages are in draft, imported, or published states

Happy blogging!

Posted by Cal Smith and Katrina Le

Source: Blogger Buzz


Earn money from your blog this holiday season

The holiday season is here and retailers are spending more on online advertising to promote their products. Your blog has valuable space and you can earn some extra money by placing Google AdSense ads next to your content.

If you don’t already have AdSense set up on your blog, visit the Earnings tab of your Blogger dashboard to give it a try. It’s free and only takes a moment to sign up. 

And if you’ve tried AdSense out in the past, head to your blog and give it a second look. It now has updated controls, so you can match the ads that appear to the style of your blog.

Happy holidays!

Posted by Ian Cohan-Shapiro, Marketing Manager

Source: Blogger Buzz


Automatically share your blog posts to Google+

Notifying your followers that you've published a new blog post not only gets the conversation going, it encourages them to reshare your content with others. In this way it's critical for growing your blog's audience and engagement. But it takes time. And we want to give you that time back.

Starting today you can automatically share your blog posts publicly to Google+ — as soon as you publish them, with no additional clicks. And of course: if you've enabled Google+ Comments, any replies on Google+ will also appear on your blog.
Blog post

Google+ post
If you've connected a Google+ page or profile to your blog, this new feature will start working the next time you publish a post. If you'd rather not share to Google+, or you'd prefer to be prompted each time, you can adjust your preferences in the Google+ tab of your Blogger Dashboard.

Happy blogging!

Posted by Marc Ridey, Software Engineer

Source: Blogger Buzz