Why Does Blogger’s Blog Redirect to a Country Specific URL

Recently Google introduced a revolutionary change which largely went unnoticed. Recently, when I was opening our official blog on Blogspot, I noticed a very strange phenomenon.

My page rank has disappeared and my blog’s URL is redirecting to a country-code top-level domain. When I was trying to open https://seocorporation.blogspot.com/ it was being redirected to http://seocorporation.blogspot.in/

I tried to open several other blogs and all shown the same phenomenon. Fortunately, I found a post on Blogger’s Official blog explaining the phenomenon.

Why does my blog redirect to a country-specific URL?

We are witnessing this URL change because Google will redirect every BlogSpot blog to your country-specific TLD based on your ip. If you are in Australia and if you try to open  https://seocorporation.blogspot.com/ It will redirect to http://seocorporation.blogspot.com.au.

A ccTLD, when it appears, corresponds with the country of the reader’s current location.

This change is being gradually launched in every country. So if you are clapping that this absurd phenomenon is not happening in your current location then just wait for few more days.

Why this Redirecting thing has been introduced?

SEO India says Google introduced this change to easily comply with data removal request in any country based on its local laws. By utilizing, ccTLDs, valid content removal requests can be managed easily which will be removed from only country-specific ccTLD thus impacting the smallest number of readers.

It’s a relief that URLs of custom domains will not be unaffected.

There was apprehension among bloggers and SEO experts that this change will adversely affect the Search Engine Optimization of their blogs. Google clarified that

The majority of content hosted on different domains will be unaffected by content removals, and therefore identical. For all such content, we 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.

Blog readers may request a specific country version of the Blogspot content by entering a specially formatted “NCR” URL.

NCR stands for “No Country Redirect” and will always display buzz.blogger.com in English, whether you’re in India, Brazil, Honduras, Germany, or anywhere.

For example: https://[blogname].blogspot.com/ncr – always goes to the U.S. English blog.

This special URL sets a short-lived cookie (session and/or a short lifetime) that will prevent geo-based redirection from the requested domain. This applies to all web browsers and all Operating Systems.

These kinds of trends are alarming. Recently Twitter announced to censor tweets based on Geographical locations. And now blogger introduced something so similar. The Online world is witnessing a shift as the homo-sapiens must have witnessed in their evolutionary history.

First, there was no law, no police, nothing. Later as the society evolved we got law, police and other laws. I will love to see the Internet as democratic as it has been. All the attempts to crush its freedom hurts me but pray that despite all hitches we move towards a more democratic online and Offline world.