Blogger is one of the best free blogging tool available and is owned by Google. Few days back Blogger has started redirecting itself to country specific URLs which has created confusion and chaos among SEOs who have been using Blogger platform for link building and content marketing. If you use blogger sites, then you can notice that you would be redirected to a country-code top level domain (ccTLD).
This means that if you are using blogger in United Kingdom, you would be seeing it as yourblog.blogspot.co.uk and on the other hand if you are viewing it in Malaysia, then you can see it as yourblog.blogspot.com.my. As of now this redirection is only for a limited number of countries and in the coming months it would be rolled out for more locations.
The redirection happens mainly due to migration to localized domains, which would help Blogger to publish content effectively and offer more flexibility in its operations. Usually a blog owner does not see any changes in the blog content except for the change in the ccTLD. But on an SEO point of view, the search engine crawlers would be getting multiple domains with the same content, as the crawlers treat same domain name under different ccTLD as entirely different domains. This would result in multiple domains having the same content and end up in getting penalized by the search engines.
This has created a good amount of fear in the minds of SEOs as they fear of getting their blogs and other link building activities getting drowned. This is mainly due to the concern that the blogs would face the issue of duplicate content due to this new redirection which may in turn affect the overall search results. But Blogger officials have promised to make solutions for this so that the bloggers would not face any serious threats to their SEO activities. Moreover Blogger would also specify the blogger.com version as the canonical one by using rel=canonical property which would help the search engines in identifying the right blogger version.
The redirection process has just started and we will just have to wait and see what all problems would arise in real time and what all we can do in order to tackle them. Hope that Blogger official would act wisely so that there would not be any serious consequences.
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