HOWTO: Redirect Blogger to a Country Domain

Recently a reader sent me a question asking how a Blogger blog can be re-directed to a custom domain representing a country domain. This post is about how this blog, The Blogger Guide, was moved in to its current address in the .lk domain.

Basically, there are two steps.

Firstly, you should configure a CNAME (or Canonical Name) record with your country domain registry. (Additionally you can provide an A-record as well, but that is optional). Let's look at this in a bit more detail.

When a visitor want to reach www.bloggerguide.lk from a browser, the program will first contact a .lk domain registry through the DNS (Domain Name Service) system. Technically, this is called a DNS look-up. A DNS look-up simply maps a domain name (or URL) to a physical web hosting server which actually hosts the web site (or blog, or any Internet service for that matter) corresponding to that domain name. In this instance, the domain name www.bloggerguide.lk is hosted by Blogger and, the .lk domain registry should return the Blogger's hosting service as the reply to the DNS look-up. A CNAME entry is, in fact, an alias to another server which actually hosts the given URL

For example, the CNAME entry given to the .lk domain registry for this blog is given below.

www.bloggerguide.lk. 3600 IN CNAME ghs.google.com.

Once this CNAME entry is configured, for every look-up request for www.bloggerguide.lk, the .lk domain registry (or the name server) will return ghs.google.com (technically, that's another domain name which needs to be resolved, but that is not relevant for this post).

Secondly, you have to tell Blogger that you will be hosting the blog on a custom domain. This step will link your blog with the custom domain name. When that is done, Blogger will know that a request asking, for example www.bloggerguide.lk, is actually looking for this blog which is running inside its servers.

The way to configure the custom domain in Blogger is very simple.

• Go to Settings : Basic : Publishing
• Click "Switch to advanced settings"
• Enter the custom domain name and click Save

Once the above two steps are completed, you are done with moving your Blogger blog to a custom domain. Of course, the DNS system might take about 24 hours to properly start resolving this new name.

See the Blogger's help article on custom domains for more details.

A Review of the Domain Transition

Towards the latter part of last year, I wrote few articles discussing about Blogger custom domains, some factors one need to consider when moving to a custom domain and also a checklist of things to do when moving to a custom domain.

These articles were the result of some learning I went through myself to evaluate the pros and cons of moving to a custom domain. In fact, I was convinced of the value of an independent domain, but was afraid of loosing traffic and most importantly the Google PageRank (PR) earned by the blogspot domain! As stated in the Moving to a Custom Domain article, a Google employee had confirmed that the PR values will be transferred within a couple of weeks, so after all, it was not very difficult to make the decision to go ahead with the domain transition, which was fully affected in January this year.

The transition was not really difficult. I had no issues with my AdSense account as it is not setup to limit the ad publishing URLs. My subscriber feed (via FeedBurner) also worked without a problem as it was named after the logical name of this blog (i.e. The Blogger Guide) and not the blogspot URL. The two visitor meters, namely Google Analytics and SiteMeter also did not require any changes as they are linked up using unique IDs, which do not depend on the domain name.

I did not see any drop in visitor counts after the transition. However, it took a considerable amount of time to recover my Alexa rank and also for the green PageRank bar to appear in places such as the Google Toolbar.

At the time of transition, my Alexa rank was somewhere around 230,000. Immediately after the transition, I had to resubmit the new domain as there is no way in Alexa to transfer the ranks from one domain to another. However, the rank for the new domain (www.bloggerguide.lk) quickly improved from several millions to something below 400,000 in a couple of weeks. And now, after about three months, it has reached the level it was at the time of the change.

The Google PageRank (of 4/10) which I had at the time of transition re-appeared on the toolbar only this week, a good three months later. I think the reason for the delay is this. There are two types of page ranks; one is a static value displayed in place such as the Google Toolbar, which Google updates from time to time. The other is a very dynamic value, which is calculated continuously and used to rank search results internally. So I think what gets restored in a couple of weeks of a domain transition are these internal PR values and not the externally displayed ones. It seems that even for transferred domains, the published PR values will only get restored in the periodic updates.

Finally, I can say that the decision to move to a custom domain did work! After a lapse of about 3 months, the blog has restored its rankings in addition to the pluses of the new independent domain.

Related Posts

• Custom Domains for BlogSpot
• Deciding to Move to a Custom Domain
• Moving to a Custom Domain

Moving to a Custom Domain

When you decide for sure that you will switch for a custom domain, the next thing is to plan and implement the move. Given below is a brief checklist for the domain transition process.

1. Purchase the Domain (if you don’t own already) – If you use the Blogger wizard the purchase (and setup) is quite trivial. But if the top level domain you want is not provided by the wizard, then you will have to purchase it from an external registrar.
2. Reconfigure External Services – It is most likely that you will have several external services such as visitor meters, feeds etc installed on your blog. Update the respective accounts of those services to reflect the change of blog URL. Some examples for such services are:
1. AdSense (if you have limited the URLs which can publish ads)
2. Google Webmaster Tools – re-submit the blog and sitemaps
3. FeedBurner or such feeds
4. Technorati, Alexa and other such rating services
5. Google Analytics, SiteMeter, Cluster Maps and similar visitor meters
3. Inform your Readers – Even after you switch to a custom domain, Blogger ensures that your previous BlogSpot URL will be redirected to the new domain. Nevertheless, inform your readers about the forthcoming change, say, by writing a post in advance.
4. Effect the Transition – Go the Settings -> Publishing section on your blog’s admin console and enable the custom domain. If you purchase the custom domain via Blogger, setting up your blog to use it is a no-brainer as Blogger will do the required technical configurations for you. However, if you buy it from a third party, then you will have to manage it yourself.
   

Last, but certainly not least, is the most important question; what will happen to your existing PageRank (PR) because of this move? You will have a temporary drop in PageRank as your custom domain is new to Google. But the good news is that you will very quickly recover the PR as Blogger will setup a 301 Redirect – Moved Permanently on its servers. (Update: See this review of an actual domain change to learn more about PR recovery)

The transfer of PR can happen as quickly as within a couple of weeks as confirmed by a Google employee on the Google Webmaster Help forum.

References:
Custom Domains - The Real Blogger Status

Related Posts

• Custom Domains for BlogSpot
• Deciding to Move to a Custom Domain
• Experiences of an Actual Domain Transfer

Deciding to Move to a Custom Domain

If you are starting a fresh blog, then publishing it on a custom domain straight-away is not much of a problem. If you already own a domain or do not want to use the blogspot.com domain, then switching to a custom domain right at the beginning is a safer and simpler method.

If, however, your blog has been running for a while under blogspot.com and has incoming links, some PageRank and also installed third party widgets, then moving to a custom domain needs some planning.

First, let’s have a look at some reasons that will make going for a custom domain worthwhile.

• Independent domain – Unlike a yourblogname.blogspot.com URL which is just a sub-domain under BlogSpot, a custom domain gives the chance to publish at an independent domain
• Ability to integrate with an existing domain – If you already have a web site, say at www.mydomain.com, then a custom domain gives the chance to integrate your blog to the same domain, say at blog.mydomain.com
• Intangible asset – In this information age, a popular domain is a valuable asset. So if you own a custom domain and your blog ramps up in popularity, that is added value for you
• Good for branding – If you are using the blog for some business/freelance activity, then a custom domain related to your business brand is better than a blogspot.com URL
  

Once you decide that you want to go for a custom domain, the next step is to prepare a checklist of things to do for the transition, which is going to be the focus of the next article in this series.

Related Posts

• Custom Domains for BlogSpot
• Moving to a Custom Domain

Custom Domains for BlogSpot

Starting your own blog on Blogger is pretty simple. Just follow three steps and you are ready to go. You post some interesting entries and then you want to share it with your friends and family. That’s when you fire an email saying “hey, check out my new blog at http://yourblogname.blogspot.com”.

Did you ever wonder why is it that your blog URL ends with blogspot.com and not just .com? Did you ever wonder why is it that some of your friends have blog URLs that looks like http://www.yourfriendsname.com? In this post, we’ll see why.

The default URL assigned by Blogger when you create a blog lies in the blogspot.com domain. A domain in Internet jargon here is a set of names. For example, the .com domain is the entire set of Internet names that end with .com and the domain blogspot.com represents a sub set of this bigger set. In technical terms, blogspot.com is called a sub-domain. (Each sub-domain can be further sub divided into smaller sub-domain.) This system of names used on the Internet is called the Domain Name System or the DNS in short. The DNS is a distributed, hierarchical system that governs the way Internet names (or domain names) are assigned and also how computers work with those names.

You cannot arbitrarily pick a domain name and use it because that name must first be registered with an authority that controls the particular domain or sub-domain. The .com is called a Generic Top Level Domain and it is controlled by an organization called the ICANN or the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers. Similarly, we can say that blogspot.com is a sub-domain (under .com) for which Blogger has acquired the right to use and maintain. Therefore, while Blogger has no problem in assigning the URL yourblogname.blogspot.com as the default URL, they cannot assign the name yourblogname.com because they have no authority over the .com domain. This is where the custom domains come in to play.

What Blogger refers to as a custom domain is a domain that does NOT end with blogspot.com. If you want your blog to have the URL yourblogname.com, first you must acquire the right to use that domain name. For Blogger blogs this can be done via Blogger itself as described here. Otherwise you can purchase it from a third party domain registrar. Domain registrars are organization accredited by the ICANN to manage Generic Top Level Domains on its behalf. (There is another type of top level domains called County Code Top Level Domains which are managed by the naming authorities in those respective countries)

Once you purchase a custom domain such as yourblogname.com, then you can instruct Blogger to publish your blog using that custom domain. But before you decide to go for a custom domain, make sure that you analyze the pros and cons of custom domains. In follow up articles we’ll take a look at why you should use custom domains and what things you should worry about.

Related Posts

• Deciding to Move to a Custom Domain
• Moving to a Custom Domain