If you are considering starting a family blog, your first instinct might be to make the blog private. Private blogs require a username and password to be able to access the content and they don’t show up in search engine results. My family has a blog where we post about what we are doing, achievements and milestones of the kids, etc. It helps us keep up with the family if someone deploys with the military or moves away. I used to have the blog set up as a private, invite-only basis, but then I learned about Internet marketing, search engines, and blogging, and made the website public.
Family Members Forget Their Logins
If you have your family blog set up with Blogger, they offer some built-in privacy options while WordPress requires a plugin. Either way, you have to give your family members logins so that they can access the blog. I can’t keep track of the amount of times my family has contacted me asking what their username and password are. If you are building your blog for your parents and grandparents to keep up with your life, many sure they can open up a web browser and remember their password for your blog. If they have trouble simply opening Internet Explorer and visiting a certain website, there’s no chance that they will ever see your blog.
There Are Exclusive Features For Public Blogs
If you are using Blogger’s publishing platform, the dynamic templates are only available for public blogs. If your blog is private, you will have to use one of the boring, standard templates. Public blogs also have an RSS feed, so you will be able to have email lists or Facebook pages that use RSS.
You Can Turn Search Engine Indexing Off
If you turn search engine indexing off, your blog will not show up in Yahoo, Google, or any other search engine. This means that the only way someone can visit your blog is by entering the direct URL. Turning off search engine indexing also keeps your images out of websites such as Google Images.
Us Professionals Work Hard To Rank Well In Google
Professional bloggers who are here to make a living work 24 hours a day, 7 days a week to get our blogs ranked in search engines. It requires SEO tactics, backlinks, and lots of effort… I promise you that your blog will not be ranking well in Google on accident.
Nothing Is Truly Private Anyway
If you are concerned about creepers knowing about your life, I would like to let you know that there are numerous other methods for them besides your blog. If I go to the dentist and learn that my dentist’s name is Jennifer Smith, I can go to WhitePages.com and search for a Jennifer Smith living near Crestview, Florida. White Pages will then return the results and give me Jennifer’s address and home phone number. I can then enter her address into Google Maps street view and see exactly what her house looks like… And there’s no way anyone can hide White Pages results.
If you think about the content that you put on your family blog, does it really need to be hidden? If you take photos at your son Kevin’s school baseball game, then blog about it and say he won 7-4, what’s the point in making that information private? Anybody in the whole world could’ve went to the school baseball game, watched Kevin play, and looked at the score to see that his team won.
I’m not trying to scare you off the Internet, I’m just sharing information with you that you might not know… The majority of stalkers and creepers can only do their job with cooperation from the victim. Often times they will go on websites like Facebook and start chatting with their victims. If the victim replies to the stalker, it would be their own fault and not be related to privacy settings of any kind. If a stalker visits your family blog, all they are going to see is baseball photos and maybe a blog post about high school graduation. There is no interaction, and therefore, no threat. Public blogs are totally safe and come with a variety of benefits.
I have been considering ways that I can document my family’s lives and to share that with others. It appears that public blogs can be a great tool for doing that. I had no idea that it was possible to turn off the search engine indexing of your blog. I can see the benefit of only somebody who has the URL visiting your sight. That’s something I’ll keep in mind moving forward.
Good points. But now a days you can virtually find anyone anywhere. Kind of scary even how when you take a photo with your cell it will save your gps where you took it. Thanks for the great blog Ian.
Some people are worried about the geotagging with your phone’s GPS, but it’s actually not that big of a deal. If you take a photo at Disney World, it’s obvious you took it in Orlando, Florida, so there isn’t really a privacy concern… And my thoughts about the family blog thing – if you are going to put it on the Internet, don’t be discouraged when somebody sees it that isn’t supposed to. The Internet is about being open and finding information.
In Romania there aren’t too vogue family blogs. But my 2 cents: family blogs must be private because contain certain information that should remain in the family: like photos, memories, videos and so on.
Yes, this is true. But if your life is that private, I don’t think you should be putting it on the Internet to begin with.
Normally family blogs contains something which the family members do not want to share with the third persona and they want to keep that secret. So if you are also running the family blog then the above tips will help you to have the secure family blog.
Yes, some families want to have a private blog. But if it’s information that doesn’t necessarily have to be 100% private, it would be better to have a public blog.