The Real Blogger Status

One of the features of custom domains, when purchased using " Buy a domain ", was the Transition period. Transition was Blogger, allowing that even with Blogger / Google controlling the domain authoritative servers (which they did, indirectly, by using eNom / GoDaddy as the registrars), and the initial DNS address setup (offered for GoDaddy purchased domains ), the stability of custom domains only starts with the domain authoritative servers, and the Root Name servers . Custom domain published blogs, to be consistently stable, can only rely on the DNS addresses being available on the local DNS servers, on a worldwide basis, 48 to 72 hours after the DNS addresses are added. This built in latency period has nothing to do with how custom domains are designed - and it's an issue over which Blogger and Google have no control.

We're seeing an increasing number of problem reports, mentioning Google Domains. Google Domains is becoming a popular registrar for new custom domains - and this leads to more problems, reported in Blogger Help Forum: Get Help with an Issue . Many reports look like timing problems, from long ago . The most common symptom is the mysterious Redirect Warning. I purchased a Google Domains site, and connected it to Blogger so it redirects my blog to my domain, no problem. The problem is now when accessing the BlogSpot URL, it now shows a redirect warning message, which is killing my web traffic. This blog is not hosted by Blogger and has not been checked for spam, viruses and other forms of malware. How do I publish my blog, and keep my readers, with this confusion?

The Google Domains feature, possibly developed as a replacement for the long discontinued and well missed "Buy a domain for your blog", appears to have problems similar to "Buy a domain" when first developed. We're seeing a small, but steadily increasing, flow of problem reports, in Blogger Help Forum: Get Help with an Issue . Problems being reported look similar to those typically seen with domains purchased long ago using "Buy a domain", before the "Transition" period was introduced to Blogger custom domain publishing.

Not all blog owners realise the importance of the blog feed, and of its effect upon search engine access to their blogs. For blogs which are published as Public, Blogger provides the option to publish a blog feed - and within that option, what size feed to publish. Full Until Jump Break Short None Custom When a blog is indexed using the sitemap - and not using the main page , or links from other blogs and websites - the proper feed type will have a major effect on blog indexing. Selecting anything other than "Full" will limit the amount of blog content - and prevent the search engines from indexing the complete blog posts. (Update 2014/11): This may not be the case, with all blogs using dedicated sitemaps, automatically generated - instead of feed based sitemaps.

We've known about the Transition period , which has applied to domains purchased through Blogger , for a few years. Under Transition, domains purchased using "Buy a Domain" were only partially published, immediately after the domain purchase - with the publishing process completed, several days later. The Transition period allowed for the domain, newly setup by "Buy a Domain", to become fully visible on the Internet , before blogs subject to Transition were re published.

One interesting question, which comes up from time to time in Blogger Help Forum: How Do I? , is about Custom Domain Publishing - and what to do, after Transition completes. Now that my blog is successfully transitioned to the domain URL, should I update the internal blog links, in the post contents? This is a question that deserves some thought. From an aesthetic sense, it makes sense to do this - hoping that you will be paying for the domain, for eternity. But, is it worth the effort?

About a year after Blogger introduced custom domain publishing , they segmented the custom domain publishing process. In order to avoid database corruption, which was a frequent cause of the "Another blog ..." problem , they introduced a delay period, which we call "Transition" . Transition lets them delay key blog updates - until the world wide DNS infrastructure has a chance to reliably update with information about any new Google custom domains. In the beginning, Transition lasted almost exactly 72 hours, and delayed creation of the "301 Moved Permanently" redirect from the BlogSpot to domain URL. Later, when Following became a fixture on most blogs, we observed that the Followers gadget was also being updated on a Transition based delay.

There's a lot of confusion seen in Blogger Help Forum: How Do I? , about our blogs, and how they are treated by the search engines, after being published to a custom domain URL. Does the Page Rank transfer to the new domain? and Is the blog automatically indexed after the change? and Will my readers be able to find my blog after the change? Each of those questions has a simple answer - but each simple answer leads to interesting detail.

Not all blog owners, who publish blogs outside the BlogSpot address space, have any feeling for the complexity of the DNS infrastructure . We see the questions periodically in Blogger Help Forum: Something Is Broken . My readers are still reporting seeing the well known problem 404 Server not found or I added the "CNAME" for my domain, and I'm still seeing another old friend (not) Another blog is already hosted at this address. when I try to publish the blog to the domain. or I added "blog.mydomain.com" to my domain, and published to it with no problem, but some readers are seeing 404 Server not found Why some - but not all?

Your blog depends upon traffic for its success. Anything that affects the traffic to your blog, such as any change in the URL , affects the success of your blog. Publishing the blog to a custom domain, like renaming the blog , will affect traffic to your blog . The effects of the change will vary from blog to blog, because of the different traffic to every different blog. Followers . People who find your blog because of recommendations by other people. Search engines . Robotic processes which methodically surf your blog, and provide dynamic indexing to people who search for information. Subscribers . People who read your content from their newsfeed reader, such as the dashboard Reading List. Viewers . People who read your content from their browser. No two blogs are the same - and no two blogs will have the same combinations of traffic sources .

In every game of poker, there comes the time to call ("show the cards"). So today, we see a question, which I've seen a few times, reechoed recently I am planning to switch my Blogger blog to a custom domain. But before doing that I would like to know all the benefits and drawbacks of switching to a custom domain name.

We've known about the gestation period of new custom domains, aka " This blog is In Transition ", for some time. When you load a blog recently republished to a custom domain, using its existing BlogSpot URL, you get an updated blog - the new domain URL in the internal links, such as the feed URLs in the header - but you get the blog at the BlogSpot URL. The "301 Moved Permanently" redirect from the BlogSpot URL doesn't come about until after the transition period ends. This helps avoid the well known Server Not Found Error 404 when using the BlogSpot URL to address a blog, just published to a new domain, which hasn't propagated through the DNS infrastructure . Recently, folks using Following started observing an oddity We're sorry... This gadget is configured incorrectly. Webmaster hint: Please ensure that "Friend Connect Settings - Home URL" matches the URL of this site. Apparently this is a condition in Following now, as the blog at th...

One of the least understood details about Google Custom Domains is the need to wait, when setting up, or when making changes to, the DNS addressing for the domain. This is important, before publishing the blog within Blogger, or telling our readers about our new non-BlogSpot blog. Daily, we see anxious queries I just used the " Buy a Domain For My Blog " wizard, and paid for my domain with my credit card. The credit card company confirmed the charge. But I see that it's " In Transition"?? or You told me how to fix my DNS problem, and I did just what you told me. But I don't see my changes when I Dig the addresses for my domain. I know that I made the changes! What is going on here? Why do I have to wait, unpredictably?

DNS, which is the backbone of Google Custom Domain publishing , is a distributed directory of all Internet hosts - like the Google servers where your domain is published. We say that DNS is a "distributed" service, because the data provided to you, by DNS, resides not in one, or two, but millions of servers - all over the Internet, and owned by many different companies and individuals. When you setup a new domain, using a DNS Management utility provided by your domain registrar or another DNS host, you can add the DNS entry when convenient to you. Some DNS management utilities will provide advice Please wait 12 to 24 hours before trying to use your new URL. or a similar message, simply because the DNS information that you enter, through the utility to your DNS server, has to be distributed to the other DNS servers , all over the Internet.

When you setup a Custom Domain, the migration process for Blogger access to the blog is transparent. The setup wizard provides encouraging advice We won't leave your readers behind! http://myblog.blogspot.com will redirect to your custom domain. Not all non Google services will update the blog URL properly, when you publish to a custom domain.

The Blogger "Google Custom Domain" product, which gives bloggers a much requested ability to use a non-BlogSpot URL with a Layouts template, was first offered over a year ago, in January, 2007 . I've been writing about Custom Domains ever since - the basic procedure of setting one up, and about the problems involved , and even about the many improvements that it's received .