If you have a blogger blog or a blogspot blog you may realize that for every blog created there that Google automatically redirects your blog domain to country specific versions based on the country of the person that’s browsing. Google uses this to sensor a page to a countries polices without affecting the other countries.So whats the big deal? for one this can be annoying as Google redirects your main domain to more than 38 different country specific domains, continue to read to learn how to stop Blogger from redirecting to country specific domains.
What Exactly do I mean?
Lets say your blogger website is called: Example.blogspot.com what you may not know is that Google provides over 38 different versions of your website to various users, if a person browses your blogspot or blogger website from India for example they will get this website: Example.blogspot.in, for those from Europe: blogspot.co.uk, Australia : blogspot.com.au and so on. Those from the USA and a few countries without a specific blogger domain will get the normal blogspot.com domain.
Sample of some redirected Domains in Adsense dashboard
The above picture is only a small portion of the domains taken from the Adsense dashboard under sites, I have also excluded the full domain name and only included the endings. I am sure if you see the full list you will agree that its excessive, now imagine what this could do to your Adsense CPC and overall earnings if you are using a blogger free website with the default domain provided by Google.
How Can I Verify what you are saying?
If you want verification simply take your blogger domain and change the ending to: blogspot.in and then try blogspot.pt or any of the other examples shown and see that they all will load just fine in your browser address bar without fail.
Finally if you have Adsense go to performance reports,under report type in the new interface select from the drop down select: sites, now scroll down and look at the domains listed, you may want to sit down for this. Also set the date range to the current month or last month and you will see what i mean.
How does this affect me?
If you are on a blogspot domain and using the normal domain name given as default this can affect:
1. Page rank of your Website seeing the SEO efforts will be divided among so many domains affecting your ranking and traffic.
2. Your earnings can be less for Adsense due to the country specific domains.
3. Its a nightmare in your Adsense Analytics when you look at the stats for Sites and see the many entries for a single Blogspot.
There can be other unforeseen effects as well the above is the main ones you should be worried about the most.
Stop Blogger from redirecting to country specific domains
If you want to stop blogger from redirecting to country specific domains here is what you do:
1. From your blogger or blogspot dashboard go to template and before proceeding be sure to make a backup in case you make a mistake you can restore.
2. When ready select edit template and find :<head>
That’s the head tag and can be seen on the picture above in yellow.
3. Copy and Paste the following code as seen below just below the <head> tag,as seen above:
<script type=”text/javascript”>
var blog = document.location.hostname.split(“.”);
if (blog[blog.length – 1] != “com”) {
var ncr = “http://” + blog[0] + “.blogspot.com/ncr”;
window.location.replace(ncr + document.location.pathname);
}
</script>
4. When you are finished save template and that’s it you can go back to your website and make sure it loads and it will as long as you follow the instructions. If it does not then restore the backup you made and try again.
You can as above in the : How Can I Verify what you are saying? try to load your blogspot domain as various domain extensions and see that this time they will all redirect to the main blogspot.com domain. So all persons who try to connect to your blogspot website will be redirected to the main domain and inside the Adsense dashboard all the many domains from now on will only show the blogspot.com domain only which is great, you might have to give it a day to truly see what I mean in your stats.
What does the code do that I am pasting?
The code uses the no country redirect to force all browsers of your website to use the normal blogspot.com version of your website without exception so all users will be automatically sent to the domain you want.
EU Cookie Law Compliance for Blogger Fix or alternative
Due to the EU cookie law you will need to ask EU website visitors for their permission when leaving cookies on their computers but blogger does this automatically for EU blogger domains such as blogspot.co.uk, you can see what it looks like above, The notification will however be disabled if you use this code so to be compliant read this article here and use the code provided to replace the EU compliance notification.
I hope my article was helpful as well as informative and you have learned something that can help you in having blogger run the way you want. Please leave a comment or leave a comment below and do share this article with your friends.
Oh.. Now I undestand why when I’m typing my blog url it’s automatically redirecting to my country.. Nice info.. Thank you.. 🙂
Yes the country specific redirect works on almost all countries redirecting you to a local version instead of a main domain.