This weekend, as the broken BlogSpot to custom domain redirect problem stretches into its 4th through 5th days, we see a diverse crowd of bloggers complaining about the problem. Some bloggers have been following this problem since Wednesday, others just discovered it today. One group of complainants which always intrigues me is the ones with the biggest and most popular blogs.
Everybody who is hurting, because of this snafu, is hurting because of links that continue to refer to the BlogSpot URL. The BlogSpot URL is the primary blog address until you publish the blog to a custom domain, and only until then. When you publish the blog to a custom domain, it becomes a secondary blog address. It's a secondary blog address which should diminish in importance, steadily, as your the custom domain address becomes more mature.
If you buy a new car, you don't leave it in the garage and keep driving the old car. Most people make up places to drive, just to show the new car off. Similarly, with a new non BlogSpot URL, you want people to know about it - both for direct browsing and for newsfeed access (Following / subscription).
As the custom domain URL becomes used, the BlogSpot URL should diminish in importance, both absolutely and relatively. Your ultimate goal should be that it would have zero importance.
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What? Blogger can't do this to me, and get away with it! I'll move my 10,000 visitor / day blog to WordPress!!as if the daily visitor count makes them more important.
Everybody who is hurting, because of this snafu, is hurting because of links that continue to refer to the BlogSpot URL. The BlogSpot URL is the primary blog address until you publish the blog to a custom domain, and only until then. When you publish the blog to a custom domain, it becomes a secondary blog address. It's a secondary blog address which should diminish in importance, steadily, as your the custom domain address becomes more mature.
- As soon as you publish your blog to the custom domain, you cease issuing the BlogSpot URL.
- As the domain becomes more mature, you have more new inlinks pointing directly to the domain.
- As the search engine databases are updated, both old and new links to the blog will point directly to the domain.
- As you publicise the blog, and encourage new inlinks, you should also encourage the conversion of existing inlinks to point directly to the domain.
If you buy a new car, you don't leave it in the garage and keep driving the old car. Most people make up places to drive, just to show the new car off. Similarly, with a new non BlogSpot URL, you want people to know about it - both for direct browsing and for newsfeed access (Following / subscription).
Hey, check out my blog with it's new URL!
As the custom domain URL becomes used, the BlogSpot URL should diminish in importance, both absolutely and relatively. Your ultimate goal should be that it would have zero importance.
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Comments
Ironically, the longer the redirect stays broken, the more people will update links. But once Google fixes the redirect, people will forget about it and leave their links as they were.