Do I Need to Worry About Blogspot Blog Auto Redirection?

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From past few weeks Google is redirecting all .com top level Blogspot blogs to country specific domain for visitors outside US. Like it is .in for India, so if a visitor from opens xyz.blogspot.com from an Indian IP, he will automatically redirected to xyz.blogspot.in.

The code which you see in place of .com is called the “country-code top level domain” or ccTLD.

Google is planning to redirect all blogs to visitor’s respective country. This trial has been intimated few weeks ago and but is limited to some countries. They are going to do the same for additional countries very soon.

Reason for Redirection

Google says that “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.”

Do I Need to Worry?

Absolutely not. They are changing this, so it is their duty to solve any problem due to this. One major problem of what webmasters are thinking if their search ranking will be hampered due to this? No my dear. Google had already solved this problem by adding a rel=canonical tag to each Blogspot blog’s page. This tag tells search engines and social widget fetcher that the .com URL provided in the meta tag should be considered as final one and not the address as specified by address bar which client has requested. So neither your ranking nor your social likes is going to reset.

However, when a post or blog in a country is affected by any censorship, then the canonical URL for affected blogs will be set to that country’s ccTLD instead of the .com version. This time you should worry.

Avoiding Redirection

No matter from where you are, you can have access to the standard U.S. English blog without country redirection. This is called “No Country Redirect” and can be accessed by placing ncr keyword in the last of target URL. Like xyz.blogspot.com/ncr