Blogspot.com redirecting to Country specific Url's

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Google with having servers in many countries is now making its blogspot.com blogs redirect to country specific domains from now on. This move at times is surely a welcome as well as a bad move as it helps visitors get the data of the blog from their country specific domain easily and also it can be a problem with countries now looking to censor the web as the web helps better in censoring too.

Google had an official announcement for this regard describing things the easier way.


Q: Why am I seeing a URL change?
A: Over the coming weeks you might notice that the URL of a blog you're reading has been redirected to a country-code top level domain, or "ccTLD."
For example, if you're in Australia and viewing http://killmaths.blogspot.com, you might be redirected http://killmaths.blogspot.com.au.  and similarly in India the blog will be redirected to http://killmaths.blogspot.in so as of now blogspot.com is redirecting to blogspot.in and blogspot.com.au which with time will increase later.

A ccTLD, when it appears, corresponds with the country of the reader’s current location.

The change doesn't produce any  other visible differences to the blog other than the URL redirecting to a ccTLD. For people like us who use custom domains the change doesn't have any effect

Q: Where will I see this change?
A: We routinely launch limited updates, so in the coming months you will see ccTLDs in additional countries.

Q: Why is this happening?
A: 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.



Q: Will this affect search engine optimization on my blog?
A: After this change, crawlers will find Blogspot content on many different domains. Hosting duplicate content on different domains can affect search results, but we are making every effort to minimize any negative consequences of hosting Blogspot content on multiple domains.


The majority of content hosted on different domains will be unaffected by content removals, and therefore identical. For all such content, we will specify the blogspot.com version as the canonical version using rel=canonical. This will let crawlers know that although the URLs are different, the content is the same. When a post or blog in a country is affected by a content removal, the canonical URL will be set to that country’s ccTLD instead of the .com version. This will ensure that we aren’t marking different content with the same canonical tag.


Q: How might ccTLDs affect the blogs I visit?
A: If you visit a blog that does not correspond to your current location as determined by your IP address, the blogspot servers will redirect you to the domain associated with your country, if it’s a supported ccTLD.
Blog readers may request a specific country version of the blogspot content by entering a specially formatted “NCR” URL.
NCR stands for “No Country Redirect” and will always display buzz.blogger.com in English, whether you’re in India, Brazil, Honduras, Germany, or anywhere.
For example: http://[blogname].blogspot.com/ncr – always goes to the U.S. English blog.
This special URL sets a short-lived cookie (session and/or a short life time) that will prevent geo-based redirection from the requested domain. This applies to all web browsers and all Operating Systems.


Note: The redirecting move has a immediate effect of showing drop in Alexa ranking been displayed, PR of the site shown as 0 for all even though it had good ranking previously. Fact is Alexa rankings doesn't have much change too for the site as the Alexa ranking for the site can be seen with blogspot.com itself later and regarding Page rank of Google it has 0% side effects by this move and would benefit the people in ways like getting backlinks to the same webpage with different link addresses from bookmarking sites and so on. The PR now showing 0 for custom domain will get updated to the original PR of the .com(the reason being all domains landing to same page will have the same PR) within a week or 2 as Google PR Toolbar update is due in february while the real PR of the site can be still viewed with checking of blogspot.com subdomain itself. So no need to worry about it like some uproar on this regard is already happening in many blogs now due to fear of nothing