New Blogger Updates

The Story of Blogger

Blogger was started by a tiny company in San Francisco called Pyra Labs in August of 1999. This was in the midst of the dot-com boom. But we weren't exactly a VC-funded, party-throwing, foosball-in-the-lobby-playing, free-beer-drinking outfit. (Unless it was other people's free beer.)

We were three friends, funded by doing annoying contract web projects for big companies, trying to make our own grand entrance onto the Internet landscape. What we were originally trying to do doesn't matter so much now. But while doing it, we created Blogger, more or less on a whim, and thought — Hmmm... that's kinda interesting.

Blogger took off, in a small way, and eventually a bigger way, over a couple years. We raised a little money (but stayed small). And then the bust happened, and we ran out of money, and our fun little journey got less fun. We narrowly survived, not all in one piece, but kept the service going the whole time (most days) and started building it back up.

Things were going well again in 2002. We had hundreds of thousands of users, though still just a few people. And then something no one expected happened: Google wanted to buy us. Yes, that Google.

We liked Google a lot. And they liked blogs. So we were amenable to the idea. And it worked out nicely.

Now we're a small (but slightly bigger than before) team in Google focusing on helping people have their own voice on the web and organizing the world's information from the personal perspective. Which has pretty much always been our whole deal.

For more on Google, check google.com. (Also good for searching.)

Blogspot.com is redirecting to Blogspot.in

Now onwards Blogger blogs will redirect to country level TLD extension. Usually I read Google webmaster central blog, Google blog, Gmail blog etc to know about latest updates from Google. Today i.e. Jan 31st 2012, I observed that "Blogspot.com is automatically redirecting to Blogspot.in". As I live in india, it's redirecting to ".in". It might redirect to .co.uk, if I live in UK.

Here is the official information from Google regarding this change - Blogspot.com is redirecting to country specific URL

Points to know regarding this change:

1. Duplicate content issue is the 1st thing we notice in this case. However Google is stating that "rel=canonical" tag will be used across all country level extensions and their team is trying to make less negative impact on search results.

2. Google will receive so many requests to remove content from few blogs. So they would like to manage country wise removal of content . Few countries may not accept some content, but other countries will. Through this latest update, Content removed as per a country’s law will only be removed from the relevant ccTLD and available for other countries.

3. Custom domains will not see any affect. Free blogspot sites will just redirect to country wise extension, remaining all same.

4. If visitors would like to visit non-country specific version, Here is the format: http://domain.blogspot.com/NCR