Blogspot Redirects to Your Country Domain

This one is for the bloggers who use blogspot to host their blogs, like me. Looks like Google and Blogger have decided that in a world divided about what is permissible and what is not, it is safer to redirect all blogspot.com pages to their respective country code top level domains. To a lay user like me, this comes with a whole lot of issues, and this post is about finding perfect answers for them by raising questions. I am hoping that the technically more knowledgeable readers of Subho's Jejune Diet will come forward to help all of us answer these questions.

From this month, all blogspot blogs will be redirecting to country specific URLs. This means that if you are in India, and you are looking at a blogspot.com blog, you will get to see the blogspot.in page. The same page if viewed from Australia will show you a blogspot.au page. This also impacts page ranks and stats for the blog. For example, this blog has an Alexa rank of 340,000 and a Google Pagerank of 2. But the blogspot.in page for this blog is not recognized at all by Alexa (it gives stats for http://blogspot.in only) and shows a N/A in Google Pagerank as of now.

Blogger support has this to say about the reason for doing this: "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."

The recent update to their Privacy Policy has already made it clear that if users do not like the fact that Google will use all the information it has about you uniformly across all its services, they are free to take their patronage elsewhere. In my opinion, for a service that brings the world together like the open web, this comes both as a solution and a let down in times of increased censorship and regulation of free speech.
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