Google is Redirecting My Blogger Blog

This post is in connection to the recent post I made last March 8 regarding my blogging problem. I investigated further and I found out that Google is redirecting my personal blog to country code top level domain (ccTLD). Instead of the common http://[blogname].blogspot.com, a certain viewer from a specific country can view my blog according to his/her current country location. That's what happened to my blog. My blog's url is keepworkingon.blogspot.com. but it is redirected to keepworkingon.blogspot.in when someone views it from India.

Why is this happening? If I may quote from Blogger Help Center:

"Migrating to localized domains will allow us to continue promoting free expression and responsible publishing while providing greater flexibility in complying with valid removal requests pursuant to local law. By utilizing ccTLDs, content removals can be managed on a per country basis, which will limit their impact to the smallest number of readers. Content removed due to a specific country’s law will only be removed from the relevant ccTLD. " explains Google.

 

Google does not specifically mention the countries that may apply to this situation but definitely India is one of these countries included. They are planning to apply this approach in other countries, too. Google is doing this so they can have easy access to censor offensive contents hosted on Blogger account based on specific country location. Right now, if you try to access any of the Blogger hosted blogs coming from India, Google readily redirect the viewer to blogspot.in address. 

 

Google imposed this approach with all the best intentions but it would give a bad result based on SEO perspective. Here is what Google says in Blogger Help Center and if I may quote:

 

Q: Will this affect search engine optimization on my blog?

 
A: "After this change, crawlers will find Blogspot content on many different domains. Hosting duplicate content on different domains can affect search results, but we are making every effort to minimize any negative consequences of hosting Blogspot content on multiple domains. 

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".

 

Take note, this is only applicable for free blogs hosted in Blogger. It does not affect at all Blogger blogs that utilize a custom domain. Now, I am contemplating on using a custom domain for my blog.