23 March 2012

Blogger Changes Top Level Domain Names for Censorship Purposes - .com to .co.uk

If you're a regular blogger you have probably noticed that Blogger has changed its top level domain name based on the country in which a blog is viewed from. It appears that this feature is based on the location of the visitor and not the Blog authors themselves.

Before these changes my blog url was: jensontaylor.blogspot.com
After the recent Blogger changes, my blog address is: jensontaylor.blogspot.co.uk

My blog always ended in .com however it has now changed to .co.uk. I have noticed the same issue for other blogspots as well. The reason my blog url is ending in .co.uk is because I access my blog from UK. If you access my blog from another country you should see the extension of that country, appended to my blog. So if you access my blog from Australia you should see my blog address as jensontaylor.blogspot.com.au


Solution - NCR "No Country Redirect"
To access the .com version of your blog you must follow your blog URL with /ncr (blogname.blogspot.com/ncr). As an example my blog would be http://jensontaylor.blogspot.com/ncr

This stops my blog from redirecting to a .co.uk top level domain address.

Google Blogger Top Level Domain Name Changes and Censorship
The reason behind the change in the top level domain names is to accommodate Google with the facility to censor blogs based on country of access. Although you might think "censorship" sounds evil, this is actually a good compromise on Google's part. Because laws are local to each country so Google only needs to block/censor a blog in one country but still allow the rest of the world to see that content. So the restrictions are not world wide.
Perhaps the ethically correct thing to do would be to boycott countries such as Iran or China but Google's number one priority is financial income and the two countries I mentioned have huge blogosphere communities as well as many users on all the other services that Google offers such as search and GMail.

USA sanctions on Iran and its effect on Google
While on the topic of censorship I like to point that I am very surprised that Google does not have to conform to the business sanctions laid out by the American government against Iran. Seems like there are some double standards. After all Google bribed contributed a lot of money to the Obama's presidential election campaign.

More Info / Resources
Google posted some question and answers on this topic
Google Blogger content policy
Google's 2007 statement on the topic of freedom of expression and its content

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15 comments:

  1. I'm rather confused by this. What do I give out as my blog address? I'm still saying .com as I don't know if I should be telling people it's .fr ??

    And I nearly posted this comment in the wrong place. You are confusing me even more!!

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Continue to give it out as .com

      There is absolutely nothing you should do differently.

      If people access your blog from France they will automatically be redirected .fr and if they access your blog from UK they will automatically be redirected to .co.uk.

      So nothing changes, I was just highlighting the change and the reasoning behind it. Most bloggers don't need to worry about this unless they are breaking some law and still want their law-breaking blog to be visible in the offending country.

      Delete
  2. I tried /ncr, as you recommended after this URL: www.lorrainemilligan.com/ but still doesn't work. Without ncr it changes .com to co.uk, with ncr it can't find the page.

    Can you recommend something?

    Thanks!

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Your case is more complicated because you are using a custom domain. I have don't have any experience on this scenario but I assume you have some option to map your domain to the blog. If that's the case instead of mapping to the direct blog address redirect your custom domain to the blog url with the forward slash /NCR

      Please let me know if you find a solution to this.

      Delete
  3. Thanks for the explanation, very useful. Whilst it doesn't seem to have had a negative affect on my page ranking in google, I have noticed that my ranking on online traffic analysers, such as Alexa for example, have reduced significantly. (Having gone down from 600K (ish) to over 9 million). Anyone got any ideas if this is likely to affect my page ranking in Google in the longer term?

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. According to Blogger engineers, the rankings won't be affected, however I am not entirely clear as people will start to link to your blog with alternative country domains instead of one single one. So my guess is that in the long run, your inbound links will be diluted. Blogs whose readers are from America are probably the least to be affected.
      We just have to wait and see what the effect are :(

      Delete
  4. I`m a danish blogger whom also suddenly have had my : com changed to DK
    --but what worce is ,taht my followers gadget has gone down because of the new adress,? does anuone have an answer for that please ?

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. I checked your blog, it seems that the gadget is working. Maybe the problem is intermittent.

      Delete
  5. thank you so much your help JT. I almost got heart attack this morning. Phew!

    ReplyDelete
  6. I switched my blog domain today and I got a .com even thought I am from Canada. I didn't get these issues like you'all did. Maybe they changed it again? Who knows!

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. I think the difference is that you are using your own top level domain name as opposed to the blogspot hosting.

      Delete
  7. thanks for the posts. good blog.

    ReplyDelete
  8. Ok so I'm a newbie to the blogging world and have only just started giving out my address to everyone - should I just go ahead and give it out as .com.au to save the redirect or save everyone a bit of extra typing? If I'm giving out links for the .com.au address am I less likely to get picked up by google search engines? Thanks so much!

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Your blog will be picked up regardless. I prefer to give out the .com address because it is easier to remember apart from that it doesn't make any difference which address you give out.

      Delete