If
you have consistent online, you might have noticed that the URL of most
Blogger blogspot.com addresses you’re reading has been redirected to a
country-code top level domain, or ‘ccTLD.’ What this simply means is
that if you’re in India and viewing [blogname].blogspot.com, you might be redirected [blogname].blogspot.com.in.
A ccTLD, when it appears, corresponds with the country of the reader’s
current location. Google thinks this is an interesting trick to defend
Blogger blogs against local laws.Why is Google doing this?
The Google team in an official statement reported the following as the reasons why they redirecting all Blogger blogspot.com addresses to country specific URLs:
“Migrating to
localized domains will allow us to continue promoting free expression
and responsible publishing while providing greater flexibility in
complying with valid removal requests pursuant to local law. By
utilizing ccTLDs, content removals can be managed on a per country
basis, which will limit their impact to the smallest number of readers.
Content removed due to a specific country’s law will only be removed
from the relevant ccTLD.”
What the above means is that [blogname].blogspot.com will continue to
exist, but it’s not clear if the users from that specific country will
still be able to access it.Who is directly affected by this change?
The country specific URLs is affected by bloggers using the Blogger Free Sub-domain name (.blogspot.com) If you are using Blogger with a Custom domain name (.com), you are not affected. If you are blogging with the Blogger Free Sub-domain name(.blogspot.com), when a visitor from India visits your blog he or she will view your blog address as [blogname].blogspot.com.in instead of [blogname].blogspot.com. So when an Indian user visits your blog, he will be redirected to yourblog.blogspot.com. The person gets redirected to “[blogname].blogspot.com.in” which is India’s specific URL.
What is the SEO and Traffic Implications of this?
Since Blogger servers will be generating several ccTLDs for all your visitors who will be visiting your blog from different country locations, this will give rise to same content with different URLs. Search crawlers/spiders will find the same content on different domains and hence this could drastically lower or affect your search results and organic traffic. Your blog can also get penalized for promoting duplicate content with different domain names.
Lets say you blog at [blogname].blogspot.in ordinarily crawlers will find similar URLs promoting the content you publish with different names such as:
blog-name.blogspot.pk
blog-name.blogspot.in
blog-name.blogspot.au
blog-name.blogspot.ru
blog-name.blogspot.nr
and so on… Leading to
Duplicate content Detected!!
Blogger team, however has managed to put a little fix on this by adding to all Blogger template a Canonical Tag to help check the cases of content duplication. If you check your templates coding you will find a new line of code added near the head section <head> of your template:
<link href=’http://blog-name.blogspot.com/’ rel=’canonical’/>
What is a canonical tag?
The canonical tag is a line of code or link that helps to alert crawlers to know that although the URLs are different, the content is the same. Blogger team added this tag following the fact that blogs sorts pages by categories and tags.
An example of this can be seen in these two links below having exactly the same content:
http://www.example.com/product.php?item=fish&trackingid=1567&sort=alpha&sessionid=5678asfasdf
http://www.example.com/product.php?item=fish&trackingid=1567&sort=price&sessionid=5678asfasdf
If you notice in the two links above, the only difference in them is
the tags “alpha” and “price”. Now this is where the problems comes as
Google robots will only consider the first link that it came across and
when it finds the same content on another link, it will mark the content
as duplicate and the blog will be marked as content duplicator and
hence faces serious drop in traffic.Since your Blogger blogspot.com domains will now contain several domain addresses in them, the canonical tag added to your template will tell spiders that though this blog has several different URL’s for the homepage or subpages but the content are same and not duplicates.
Now the above solves the problem of SEO and Traffic, what about viewing of your blog address?
You can temporarily prevent Blogger from doing the “country specific URL redirect” while viewing a blogspot blog by entering a specially formatted NCR URL to request a specific country version of the blogspot content without redirecting to your ccTLD. NCR stands for ‘No Country Redirect‘ This will always display [blogname].blogger.com in English, irrespective of where you viewing the blogspot blog. For example: http://[blogname].blogspot.com/ncr will always goes to the U.S. English blog.”
What You Can do Prevent ALL of These (My Advice)
In as much Blogger team has put a fix to this, there may not be long term promise that things would remain the same, that is why I would strongly suggest you buy a Custom domain name for your blog, that way you will be completely FREE from any future fallback.
How to Get a Custom Domain Name
Buying a custom domain name is very easy with Blogger. All you need do is sign into your blogger account >Settings > Basic > Publishing > Add a custom domain. The domain name will cost you $10. Usually your domain name will be registered by Godaddy.com, but Google helps you get to Godaddy through them so it can be cheaper.
I am a Nigerian and I don’t Have a Credit Card, plus I don’t know how to Set it Up
You are not alone! I have been helping most Nigerians register a domain name. All you need do is read my introductory post on Let Me Help Change Your Blogger Blogspot Address to .com Domain, and Make it Work the Same Day. Once you are done reading the post, everything would just be fine…
