Stop Blogger Redirect to country-specific Domain (ccTLD)
Blogger or Blogspot blogs now redirect to their location-based or country-specific URLs or ccTLDs. For example, a blogger blog from India with a URL blog.blogspot.com will redirect to blog.blogspot.in. The reason behind all this is Google’s step towards operating as per the local law of different countries around the globe. If a blog is found violating local law, it will be blocked in that particular locality (or country) only. In short, it is all meant for Selective Censorship. That’s pretty transparent, isn’t it?
But this redirection has some demerits too. If you’re running a blogspot blog from a long time, and now it is redirecting to the country-specific domain, you’re gonna face these major problems:
- All the social stats like Facebook shares, tweets and +1 counts for your posts will be gone.
- PR juice from all the backlinks you got will start leaking.
- If you use external commenting platforms like LiveFyre, Disqus, Facebook comments, the previous comments will not be shown on the blog.
- If you’ve not specified Canonical URLs in your blog, you may suffer big loss in Google juice and PageRank.
- Online monitoring services like Google Analytics, Webmasters etc. will not show you the proper stats.
Bloggers using custom domain with Blogger need not to worry, as custom domain are unaffected of this change.
As a matter of fact, the blogspot.com version of a blogger blog can be visited by adding /ncr with the URL i.e. blog.blogspot.com/ncr will bring you to blog.blogspot.com, not to blog.blogspot.in.
How to stop Blogger from redirecting to ccTLDs?
If you’re experiencing great losses in rankings and search engine juices due to this change, and want to stop redirection from blogspot.com to country-specific blogspot domain, just follow the below given steps:
- Sign into your Blogger account and go to Design » Edit HTML in your blog (go to Template » Edit HTML if using new Blogger layout).
- Paste the below code just after the head tag i.e. <head>:
<script type="text/javascript"> var host = document.location.hostname; var path = document.location.pathname; var ext = host.substr(host.lastIndexOf('.')); if (ext != '.com') { var com = 'http://' + host.substr(0, host.indexOf('.')); com += '.blogspot.com/ncr' + path; window.location.replace(com); } </script>
- Save changes by clicking “Save Template” button.
Now, open your blog and see it accessible at it’s previous state, i.e. at blogspot.com by default.
If you are planning to switch to a custom domain name, you should read our how-to on setting up custom domain with Blogger.