If you are living in India and have a blog on Blogspot, this might interest you. Google is redirecting all blogspot blogs from blogspot.com to blogspot.in.
This is not for only blogs from India, but all blogs that are looked up from an IP address in India. While if you are using your own personal domain hosted on Blogspot, your domain name will remain the same.
For example that Google’s official blog which has the original URL as
http://googleblog.blogspot.com
but for Indian users, it shows up as
http://googleblog.blogspot.in/
Why is Google re-directing Blogspot blogs?
Well Twitter has decided to censor tweets based on country specific basis, so that they can conform to local laws regarding content. Google is doing pretty much the same thing.
As Google explains in the this support forum, it is trying to conform to local law agency suggestions on taking down or blocking certain content at the same time keeping it online otherwise.
For example, if a URL is deemed offensive in India and the court orders Google to remove it, it can block the link for Indian readers but it would still be available from other countries.
Will it affect Google Page Rank or search rankings?
I tried to run a Google search for .in domain of Google’s official page. The query I entered was
“site:http://googleblog.blogspot.in/”
and it returned no results. So I guess we are not going to see two separate URLs for the same content showing up in the link.
Google will probably (hopefully) make sure that it does not affect many blogs and the search juice they get.
Would love to get your views in comments about Google new move for Blogspot. Do drop in your comments.
(via Google System)
13 Comments
This blog of mine http://income-opportunities.blogspot.com/ is 6 years old is redirected to http://income-opportunities.blogspot.in/
It has lost its PR2 and the Alex rank has slipped from 500k to 10 million.
You will not lose PR but yes Alexa rank will drop
Hi Aditya,
Blogger.com managing the page rank and search ranking for both the urls by inserting “rel=canonical” tag inside the blogger template. So I don’t think the SEO will affect for blogs.
But there is a big loss with social button counts with the country wide URL. Most of the blog already lost their tweet, FB, G+ count.
will it effect on SEO factor of that blog
@hitgrove: I doubt SEO Factor for a blog will be affected. At most Page Rank might show wrong but the PR for .com address will remain.
Just wondering if the blogs with Custom Domain name will also get censored or not. Will have to wait to find that out, if so, will port from blogspot to wordpress…..
@Gagan: Not this does not affect blogger being used on your personal domain names.
The domain names won’t be changed for custom domains, but my question is, whether or not they’ll be censored?
At first i thought it just mean for INDIANS only! But i then got to know that every blog will have .com domain but will changes to countires specific domain like .in for INDIA and .co.uk for Britain.
My blogspot blogs are too redirecting this way.I don’t think that is good in SEO point of view.
Well, Google ownes blogspot, NOT WE.
Same happened with one of my blog, analytics shows often, http://www.seekpoetry.blogspot.com
and http://www.seekpoetry.blogspot.co.uk
Anyhow, Not everyone cares about knowing the page rank or Alexa, But insidely google knows the worth of your blog, So there is nothing much to worry about.
Google has said that it does affect SEO practices since crawlers will find the same content on different domains. And Google has algorithm like panda or penguin which penalise copying of content. Same content over different domains will mean to copying only.