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Setting Up A Gateway Blog

For various reasons, some bloggers want to have a BlogSpot URL that points directly to a web site not hosted by Google, with content not produced by Blogger. This is generically called a "gateway" blog. They explicitly want a BlogSpot URL, pointing to offsite content.

Many bloggers wanting to do this don't know how to do this, nor are they aware of the consequences of doing this.

To forward a BlogSpot URL properly, you need a server based DNS redirect - which you can't do in BlogSpot, since you don't have server based access. You could put a meta refresh into the blog header, and that might work, but depending upon how you do that, either the search engines will penalise your blogs for duplicate content, or the domain won't be visible to your readers. And some security minded folks have browsers explicitly configured to ignore meta refreshes.

If you do get a "301 Moved Permanently" working, your readers will be seeing an "Offsite Content" interstitial warning. Redirecting traffic offsite is what hackers and spammers try to do, in using a BlogSpot blog as a gateway to their splog farms. An interstitial warning will confuse your readers, and muck up the SERPs for the blog. Your readership, and your search engine reputation, will suffer.

So yes, it's possible to redirect a BlogSpot URL to a non Blogger / Google web site - but it may be a lot of work, and it won't give you good results. The only effective way to redirect BlogSpot traffic is with a custom domain, to Google hosted content. You can combine a Blogger blog with a non Blogger website, in a number of varying ways, using a Google custom domain.

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