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To Republish A Custom Domain, You Do Have To Add A Second "CNAME"

One of the challenges of using Blogger involves following the instructions.

Blogger / Google personnel provide Help instructions which are not always updated - sometimes they simply write a new Help instructions document, leaving the old Help instructions in place.

The policy of leaving old Help instructions in place - and sometimes conflicting with new displays and procedures - occasionally causes confusion. One scenario where this causes a problem is in publishing or re publishing a blog to a custom domain.
I've seen instructions that when you buy a domain from Blogger / Google, using "Buy a domain", you won't need to create a CNAME record.

One of the advantages of using "Buy a domain" is the ease of setup. If you use "Buy a domain", you don't have to bother with any of the details. This is generally - but not always - true.

(Update 2013/09): The second "CNAME" won't be required, in all cases. If you don't see instructions for adding a second "CNAME", focus your efforts on getting the domain working, with righteous base DNS addresses,

Sometimes, even using the "Buy a domain" wizard can later present a problem.

One of the known problems with "Buy a domain" results in a partially setup domain - and with a partially setup domain, you may have to re publish the blog to the domain, to get the new domain to work completely.

To re publish the blog, you have to verify your ownership of the domain - even if you previously used "Buy a domain". And the additional step of adding a second "CNAME" overrides the old Blogger Help instruction
If you bought your domain name from Blogger, you won't need to create a CNAME record.
When you are instructed to re publish the blog using "Advanced settings", that 's what you must do. And, when "Advanced settings" contains instruction to add a second "CNAME", then please - add a second "CNAME".

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Comments

Leigh said…
Chuck, I've always appreciated your help on the forums and appreciate this blog too. I've decided to buy a domain name for my main blog, and have been trying to do my homework beforehand. Blogger help for this has quite a few broken links and even seems to contradict some of your advice. I see now that much of Blogger's own instructions are outdated, which only adds to the concern of making a mistake and having problems.

I admit I don't always understand everything you're saying in these posts, but not because of you. It's because it's new territory and I don't have an experiential background to always "get it." No questions at this point though; I think I'm just trying to work up my courage to take the next step, LOL
Leigh said…
Success. The transition is going smoothly, but I do have one question. All my posts contain links to previous posts. These have the blogspot URL, so I'm wondering if it would be a good idea to begin to change these to their new domain name address. (I'm wondering how it will effect search engine crawling.) Thanks.
Leigh said…
Chuck, thank you. You have confirmed my reasoning as far as I've been able to take it. The only other reason I can think to change the internal links, is if one would ever choose to move the blog from Blogspot. I know folks transfer to other blogging platforms, or even to their own website.

Now I love Blogger and have always promoted it as the best option available. Their recent nudges toward giving a cell phone number and joining G+ though, are worrisome to me and I fear they may tread where I cannot follow, i.e. requiring one or both (I don't have a cell phone and have neither the use nor time for social networking). It would be a dire circumstance, but if I had to, I might move it. That's the only situation where I could see needing to change all those links.
Hi, So should I point my CNAME to just ?
www
ghs.google.com

Pls help me
Nitecruzr said…
Hi Abhishek,

Thanks for the question.

You point the "CNAME" to "ghs.google.com". There are no other settings that work as well.

http://blogging.nitecruzr.net/2012/04/simplicity-of-custom-domain-setup.html

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