A few weeks ago, the blogging platform Blogger announced that it was ending support for the FTP publishing method via its control panel. This is because only 0.5% of their users used this service, but servicing these used a lot more resources than 0.5%. It also coincides with a change in Google’s infrastructure that would render the current method that FTP is used by inoperable. As Google own Blogger, the removal/change of this technology means that it was unworkable for them to continue supporting Blog publishing via FTP.

This was quite frustrating for some of those that work in SEO, many of who had used Blogger as a simple platform to help clients setup a blog on their website, with very little in the way of configuration and installation.

I’ve helped a number of clients setup blogs for their websites using Blogger – and this proved to be a useful tool, as it allowed via FTP, the publishing of a blog to the same website as the main site, but in a sub-folder, such as /blog/. This capability was due to be removed on the 26th March, but it has now been announced that the migration deadline for FTP users of Blogger has now been extended until May 1st.

This gives Bloggers that use the FTP service a bit more time to work out how to either migrate to a sub-domain (as opposed to a sub-folder which FTP allows you to do) – although this has to be configured as a custom domain and remain hosted by Google’s servers. It also gives FTP users a chance to identify a new platform that retains Blogger’s simplicity, although having looked for some alternatives myself in the last month, there are not many similar solutions available.

In the light of Blogger’s recent removal of some music related Blogspot hosted domains,  there are fears that there could be more sinister reasons for the enforcement of hosting with Google, either on Blogspot or on a custom domain, in that Google & Blogger then have control over the content being published to these blogs – and should they have reason to, are able to remove this content from a website. This capability was not there for sites that were publishing via FTP, and ultimately this change means that Google will have full control over whether or not content published through Blogger remains visible on the Internet for all sites that continue using the platform.