Google, as everybody knows, redirects Blogger’s blog to country-specific domains. For instance, if you open shashidharkumar.blogspot.com in your browser, you might be redirected to shashidharkumar.blogspot.in if you are located in India or to shashidharkumar.blogspot.com.au if you access the same blog from Australia.
The main reason why Google implemented country-specific redirection is selective censorship – they can now easily block a blog, or a particular page on a blog, in one country but still serve it in other regions.
Country specific domains for blogger:-
My traffic logs suggest that country-specific redirection in Blogger is now live in at least 15 countries. If shashidharkumar.blogspot.com is blog name than it will be redirected like in India [shashidharkumar.blogspot.in], in Australia [shashidharkumar.blogspot.com.au], in UK [shashidharkumar.blogspot.co.uk], in Japan [shashidharkumar.blogspot.jp], in New Zealand [shashidharkumar.blogspot.co.nz], in Canada [shashidharkumar.blogspot.ca], in Germany [shashidharkumar.blogspot.de], in Italy [shashidharkumar.blogspot.it], in France [shashidharkumar.blogspot.fr], in Sweden [shashidharkumar.blogspot.se], in Spain [shashidharkumar.blogspot.com.es], in Portugal [shashidharkumar.blogspot.pt], in Brazil [shashidharkumar.blogspot.com.br], in Argentina [shashidharkumar.blogspot.com.ar], in Mexico [shashidharkumar.blogspot.mx].
What will be the effect on On-line presence?
This country based URL redirection does mean some negative consequences to your Blogger blog. For example:
- The social stats – like Facebook Likes, Google +1s and Tweet counts – for your blog stories may be diluted as the URLs for the same story become different from different visitors.
- You will have a similar problem if you are using an external commenting platform like linkedin or Facebook Comments.
- Also, if canonicalization isn’t implemented properly, it may cost you some Google juice as external websites may link to your country-specific pages.
Prevent blogger from redirecting to country specific domains
If you are not happy with the idea of Blogger redirecting your blog to a different URL, you can add the following piece of code to your Blogger template and it will always serve the .com address to your visitors irrespective of their geographic location.
Go to your blog inside the Blogger Dashboard and choose Template. Then click the “EditHTML” button followed by “Proceed.” Next, copy-paste the following code into the template after the <head> tag.
<script type=”text/javascript”>
var blog = document.location.hostname;
var slug = document.location.pathname;
var ctld = blog.substr(blog.lastIndexOf(“.”));
if (ctld != “.com”) {
var ncr = “http://” + blog.substr(0, blog.indexOf(“.”));
ncr += “.blogspot.com/ncr” + slug;
window.location.replace(ncr);
}
</script>
Click the Save Template button and now your Blogger Blog will always serve with the blogspot.com URL.
This simple script parses the domain name (document.location.hostname) of your blog page and if it includes a country-specific URL (like shashidharkumar.blogspot.in), it will force-redirect the visitor to the shashidharkumar.blogspot.com address using the /ncr switch.
