Sunday, February 12, 2012

Blogger Domain changed from .com to ccTLD

Blogger/Blogspot hosted blog will now be redirects to your country-code top level domain. Blogs from various countries hosted on blogger/blogspot platform with .blogspot.com domain will now to redirected to your ccTLD( country-code top level domain ). In case of blogs from India, will now be redirected from .com to .in TLD. And same is the case with all other countries  Blogspot/Blogger Domain changed from .com to .in . This change does not applies on custom domain blogs, blogger/blogspot blogs with their custom domain will not be affected in any way.


Why is Blogspot/Blogger changing domain to countries specific TLD?
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.

Will Blogspot/Blogger domain redirection affect my blog?

Blog owners should not see any visible differences to their blog other than the URL redirecting to a ccTLD. URLs of custom domains will be unaffected.

Will this affect SEO of my blog?

After this change, crawlers will find Blogspot content on many different domains. Hosting duplicate content on different domains can affect search results, but Google is 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, Google 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.

Visit Google Support Page for more details.