The situation is now, Google Blogspot blogs with .com extension are being redirected to .in for India. The situation is quite worse as there are several versions of urls are coming. This Blogspot Duplicate URLs duplicate thing is some what closer to our self hosted WordPress's beloved duplicate content issue.
What is the exact problem with Blogspot Duplicate URLs
I honestly do not know what web software Google uses for Blogger - its quite obvious there is some software like old WordPress MU version (now separate MU is not needed for newer WP). To make the the thing clear, WordPress.com has MU version of WordPress (actually not WordPress MU now, its 3.3.1, but take it as example). So, the system is - when I am creating a free blog on wordpress.com, I am using the main domain's software (that is WordPress MU), but the easy interface is allowing to create a subdomain without any need of actual process for creating for a subdomain which we follow. The user interface makes it easier to create a subdomain. So, our strategically 'blocked' blogger account - thecustomizewindows.blogspot.com needed no extra effort, a simple signup created it. There is no problem with WordPress - you can try to get thecustomizewindows.wordpress.com and you will find its saying its reserved. Probably they have manually set it for us. So the thing is made enough complex, let it make easier - when you are signing up for a free Blogspot or WordPress blog, the CMS software is creating a subdomain without any need of manually domain mapping that we do for creating our subdomains (usually). Now due to change in Google's Policy, they have decided to do a redirection to country level domain names, apparently .in is functional now. So, when I am typing thecustomizewindows.blogspot.com in the browser address bar and hitting enter, its redirecting me to thecustomizewindows.blogspot.in. As these two urls are different, search engines (read Google) will catch them as harboring duplicate contents.
Worse problem is, both www and non www version is working. To summarize the the Blogspot Duplicate URL thing, you can open -
www.thecustomizewindows.blogspot.com
www.thecustomizewindows.blogspot.in
thecustomizewindows.blogspot.com
thecustomizewindows.blogspot.in
Possible solutions for Blogspot Duplicate URLs
Buy a top level domain name. It is painful as it is not possible to get all the backlinks towards the new domain. Amit Agarwal has nicely pointed out the solution for one set of Blogspot Duplicate URLs :http://www.labnol.org/india/blogspot-blogs-in-india/20765/This solution for Blogspot Duplicate URLs is based on canonical relationship tag, canonical solves the problem (theoretically) of Blogspot Duplicate URLs. To use this solution for your Blogspot Duplicate URLs, the steps are :
- Determine whether you are using a new Blogger template or an older one. If its a newer one, that means for the XML version of Blogger templates, you need to add in between head in HTML source of your Template :
- If it is an older template, then it will be (the above will not be needed) :
