Visitors from India who visit any Blogger (BlogSpot) blog will now be redirected to a .in domain of the URL. Which means if you blog's URL is http://www.example.blogspot.com visitors from India will be redirected to http://www.example.blogspot.in. This change is currently only visible to visitors of India, Australia and New Zealand and is slowly rolled out for users of other countries.
This means visitors browsing your blog with IP of any country will be redirected to the country specific URL. However users who are using a custom domain are not affected in any way.
BlogSpot servers will redirect the user to the country specific domain if the ccTLD is supported depending upon the IP address.
Users may request a specific country version of the blog by entering a specially formatted "NCR" URL. NCR stands for - "No Country Redirect".
For example - http://example.blogspot.com/ncr - will always take you to the .com (U.S.) version of the blog. ccTLDs in additional countries will be rolled out in the coming months.
Why is this happening?
Google is hearing in Delhi court for content removal which violates Indian policies and hence migrating to localized domains will make content removal easier which violates policies as per the local law.
By using ccTLDs content removal can be managed as per country basis which will impact lesser amount of readers. Content which is removed due a specific country's law will only be removed from the specific ccTLD.
Blogger Redirecting Visitors to Country Specific URL of BlogSpot
Pros:
- Faster serving of the page as the domain is now localized.
- Posts and Comments are not affected in any way.
Cons:
- You traffic is diversified across both domains.
- Your Alexa ranking will get affected.
- Visitors may get confused due to the changed URL structure.
- No PageRank for .in version of the domain.
Many other problems may arise due to this change which can very badly hurt your blog's traffic and SEO, however Google will make use of the rel="canonical" tag which will prevent search engines from indexing different country versions of the same post but webmasters may still notice negative effects of this change.
Solution to Prevent Duplication:
- Open your Blogger template go into EDIT HTML mode and search for the following code in between the <head> and </head> and tag.
- Now add the code below after the line of code above and save the template.
Blogger automatically inserts the code above but if you have a custom template or for some other reason you don't have the code you should add it to your template to avoid content duplication.
By adding the above code you are instructing search engines that the .com ccTLD is the original source of the content, so now the content on the .in ccTLD will not be considered as duplicate content.
Now What?
Now the question arises what to do? You should consider moving to a custom domain immediately for added benefits and to stay unaffected by this change as Blogger at this point of time has not provided any option to choose between country specific and .com version of the domain.
For now what you can do is only wait for Blogger to make this change optional so that blog owners can choose if they want their blog served to visitors as a localized domain.
What are your views about this move by Blogger? Voice your opinion using the comment form below.
Labels : Blogger, News | | 21:58
I wondered why it was happening to my blog in that way!
ReplyDelete-Nice blog sharing information
ReplyDeleteThanks banti :)
Delete