Blogger or Blogspot in the search engines

I find it odd you say that. Every single niche I'm in almost I'm competing directly with blogspot blogs. Wordpress? not so much. Xanga? I have never seen Xanga in an SE.

yea blogspot blogs are easy to spam with, they are ALL over the place.

My blog is getting some pretty good hits from Google natural search.

It could be that people who use wordpress do a bit more SEO-wise to get traffic.

Speculation:  Blogger is so easy to use that it's like Polaroid was to cameras a generation ago.  Setting up a WP or similar account actually takes effort.  Setting up a Blogger account takes....a Google account.

We did start with Blogger on all of our sites because our subject matter experts were not web people, and it was easier to introduce them to the tool.  But we skinned that puppy within an inch of its life, and we hosted it.  Most casual observers wouldn't even know that Blogger is underneath the hood. 

Our goal was always to get the SMEs (whose subject may be crafts or sports) comfortable with the easy tool and then take off the training wheels. ;-)

i absolutly agree with this. i have a blogger blog that I quickly realized i wanted to move over to wordpress. i did and got TONS more search traffic. but i moved back b/c i didn't like the analytics options.

i did some research on this on some blogger forums, but wasn't able to find any hard concrete reasons why this was so. but most people  agreed with this.

I agree with Kathryn. I've tried both Blogger and Wordpress before and I found the Wordpress one getting more visitors than Blogger. The negative of going with just Wordpress.com is that the analytics is fairly basic... although I guess that could be a positive for newbies. With Blogger you can use Google Analytics... or any other analytics for that matter.

I guess in terms of my experience with Blogger and Wordpress the pros of Blogger is that it's quite easy to use, you can use your existing GMail account (if you have one, that is), you can change the templates and install add-ons free of charge.

With Wordpress,com it is a little more trickier to use, you have to register with Wordpress, and you have to pay to change templates or install add-ons. And you're easier to find on the search engines.

I'm not sure why Blogger is harder to find in the search engines though, by right it should be a little bit  easier compared to what it is now. But I also find that there are loads of splogs (spam blogs) on Blogger/Blogspot, so perhaps that's a good thing that Blogger blogs are harder to find on the search engines!