(UNITED STATES) June 19, 2012 – A blog's location on the web is just as important as the actual content within it, according to Staging Diva Debra Gould. On the Home Staging Business Report blog, Gould provides advice for avoiding some of the risks associated with blogging.

"Many home stagers who are new to blogging start out with a free blog on WordPress.com, Blogger.com or ActiveRain.com," explains Gould, founder of the Staging Diva Home Staging Business Training Program. "These options are attractive because you can get started right away with their templates and best of all, it's free! You just need to decide on a name for your blog, open an account and within minutes you can be typing the content for your first blog post."

In fact, Gould reports that she used Blogger when she first started blogging in 2005. Blogger is owned by Google, so their search engine spiders index Blogger content quickly.

"No matter where you build your blog, it's important to know that every post has its own unique URL," Gould reports. "Each category of post also has a unique URL. This is a good thing because every URL represents another page that Google and the other search engines can index, creating higher search engine rankings."

However, Gould explains that blogs on Blogger, Active Rain and other sites are built on those companies' web property, or "domains." The bloggers themselves do not own the pages their blogs are written on, so they do not benefit from the search engine rankings. In addition, if Google were to cancel their free Blogger service or if Active Rain started charging high fees for blogging, many bloggers would have no option but to discontinue their blogs.

"Imagine if you only posted to your home staging blog twice a month for 5 years. That would mean you'd have 120 web pages disappear overnight along with all of the content!" Gould says. "If you posted the recommended minimum of once per week during that time, you would lose 260 web pages. Imagine all those pages with your name or company name in Google searches suddenly gone—poof!"

When Gould first learned this information a number of years ago, it was a rude awakening since she had already built up hundreds of blog posts on Blogger. After careful consideration, she eventually decided to start again from scratch.

Gould encourages home stagers and other entrepreneurs to visit the Home Staging Business Report on the Staging Diva website for advice on what to do if their blogs are not built on their own domains.



About Staging Diva

The creator of the Staging Diva Home Staging Business Training Program, Debra Gould has staged millions of dollars' worth of real estate, including 7 of her own homes. She is the president of Voice of Possibility Group Inc., which operates a home staging division, SixElements.com, in addition to StagingDiva.com, which has trained over 7,000 home stagers to start and grow their own businesses.

Debra has gained international recognition through features in major media in the US and Canada including: This Old House, HGTV, CNN Money, CBC National News, CBS Radio, Global TV, City TV, The Wall Street Journal, Women's Day, Reader's Digest and more.

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