Blogger: Custom Domains Using 301 Redirect

Almost a year ago -- I made the switch to a custom domain from Blogger's blogspot domain system. At that time, the process went fairly smoothly and although I lost a low page rank score, I was glad that I made the change. Immediately, traffic started flowing from my ken-hanscom.blogspot.com address to the new www.somelifeblog.com address. There was one slight problem though, while www.somelifeblog.com delivered all of the expect the traffic to my website, somelifeblog.com went into DNS oblivion and left me stranded. I thought there had to be a way to get both of these URLs to work in combination with each other. Interestingly, there are several articles out there suggesting that this is simply not possible. However, they are incorrect.

Here is how not to do it:
When I followed the instructions of setting up my GoDaddy.com hosting address, I pointed the "A" record to ghs.google.com for www.somelifeblog.com as per the Google Blogger instructions. However, since Blogger did not support multiple domain in their system, I thought I would be tricky and point the root of the domain's record (somelifeblog.com) to refer to www.somelifeblog as the "A" record in DNS, hoping that it would in fact , but that did not work. Rather, Google's friendly message of "404 file not found" -- leaving your site effectively with a bad user experience.

However, there is hope. Rather than trying to trick DNS, you can setup a 301 redirect in your DNS host. In fact the definition of the HTTP 301 redirect is that it returns a permanent redirect status indicating that the resource has moved permanently. This is the "authorized" way to redirect traffic from one domain name to the other. In fact, Google and the other search engines recognize redirect and even if you change domain names, you should not lose or have your Google traffic penalized. However, many sites have been penalized for using a 302 redirect. (more information here)

The only thing is that if you are having your DNS hosted, the provide must have the infrastructure to support the 301 redirects. The good news is that my DNS hosting provider, GoDaddy.com supports the 301 redirect -- as do most larger DNS hosting providers. In just a couple of minutes this evening, I finally setup the 301 direct for my blogger site and traffic now flows into www.somelifeblog.com from somelifeblog.com. It only took me a year -- since I was able to find very few articles (actually none) that described this process, I though I would share my learnings. :-)

How is it done? Here are the steps:

1. Log into your GoDaddy.com account.

2. Click on your "My Account" link right under where you logged in.

3. From the drop-down menu on "Domain Name" select "Manage Domain Forwarding"

4. Click on the domain name that you want to 301 redirect from the main window.

5. In the upper section under forwarding, it is currently set to 'Disabled', change it to 'Enabled'. Enter the address that you want to forward the traffic to. In my case, it was http://www.somelifeblog.com. Finally, make sure that the radio button for "301 Moved Permanently" is selected and click 'OK'.

6. The site will take a couple of minutes to save the information.

7. In as short as 2 minutes or as long as a couple of hours, traffic directed at the root of your site should start flowing into your forwarded domain. Check out http://somelifeblog.com to see it working in action!

Did this work for you? If so, please let me know with a comment below.

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Blogger Languages – A Funny Thing Happened Today

I wonder if Google & Blogger are too smart for themselves. The reason that I wonder is that a very funny thing happened today in Cancun, Mexico. When I signed it to catch up on a couple of postings – I logged into Blogger like I normally do. However, something very strange happened. Upon completion of the auto-login to the Google account things were completely different.

How different were they? Not too much, just that – the language on everything was now Spanish rather than English. Apparently, Google’s Blogger decided to detect that my IP address was coming from a location here in Cancun, Mexico and reacted to that. Every link and instructional information was now in Spanish on my Dashboard – without evening asking me if that was my choice. Very odd behavior.

Furthermore, it took me a few seconds to find and realize where the I could change the setting for language because 1) I am not completely fluent in Spanish anymore, and 2) I have never really looked for our cared about the languages setting. However, I hit the drop-down for language and found “Ingles – English” and everything went back to normal.

Here’s the odd part, I have logged into Blogger from several different countries including Germany and India and have not had this behavior. I actually suggest that the automatic language detection and changing for someone who already has a Google and a Blogger account that is set to English is a bad idea and bad user experience.

I guess I need to report this to the folks at Blogger as a bug that needs to get fixed.

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Blogger. Switching to a custom domain? Does it work?

Are you considering switching your Blogger (Blogspot) domain to publishing to a custom domain? If so, you will want to read on to see how it works, and some things to watch out for!

I recently changed from my original blogspot site address http://ken-hanscom.blogspot.com/ to http://www.somelifeblog.com/ via the custom domain setting on the "Publishing" tab in the Blogger Dashboard. While the process was not flawless, as you can tell the move was successful! This was also using the "NEW" formerly "BETA" blogger.

While the directions in "Help" on Blogger are pretty helpful, there were a couple of pitfalls. Here are the steps that I followed in order to setup and move the domain.

1. Find an available domain name that you want.
2. Choose an registrar that can register your name and also point your DNS to Google from. I check the usual suspects: Network Solutions & Register.com. While these have been some well known names in the industry, they are definitely still expensive -- especially if you want them to just point towards Google. In the end, I went with GoDaddy.com -- for a total of $12.19 for 1-year, including DNS management.
3. Create a CNAME DNS entry for the "www" whatever you want the first part of your domain name to be and point it to "dhs.google.com". At GoDaddy.com, it is under the "Total DNS Control" link.
4. Wait 24-48 hours. Sometimes it can take up to 48 hours for domains to properly propagate across the internet, so be patient!
5. Go to the publishing tab of your Blogger blog, switch to custom domain and type in the exact address of your new domain name. Be careful, if you setup a CNAME in step for "http://www.somelifeblog.com/", and enter "somelifeblog.com" -- it will not work. It must be the exact entry.
6. Test your new address, it should be live immediately.

For me, the process worked fairly well. The change was immediate, and I was able to access my blog via the address I provided to Blogger. In fact, all of my old links transferred perfectly from http://ken-hanscom.blogspot.com/ to http://www.somelifeblog.com/. Things were good.

However, there was one major problem. Although the blogger FAQ mentions that all your pictures transfer over properly, but mine did not. In fact, all of my pictures show as missing on any of the posts where I uploaded pictures, however all of my referenced pictures from Picasa and other sites still work. (http://www.somelifeblog.com/2006/11/disneyland-for-thanksgiving-family.html, for an example that has not been fixed as of this post.)

I reported this bug to the Blogger (Google) staff about a week ago, yet still have not received any answers nor even a response. Honestly, a little disappointing.

There are other impacts that you will want to be aware of.

1. If you have been running your site for a long time and have accumulated a lot of links, your search engine and other rankings may not be as good as before. You should contact those that have linked to you and ask if they can update their links. This site, being relatively new is just starting to generate strong traffic -- so I decided to take the hit now, rather than later.
2. Your Google Page Rank will disappear. My site, in the couple of months since I kicked it off had already achieved a Google Page Rank of 2 out of 10 (2/10). However, immediately upon the switch my page rank is back to zero. Now I will have to wait until the "next" update, which is approximately quarterly. This may also have a SEO (Search Engine Optimization) impact on your site.

Understanding that you may impact the traffic and performance of you site on a short term basis, why would anyone want to under-go this change? A few reasons come to my mind:

1. Flexibility. Owning my own domain enables provides the flexibility to move away from Blogger in the future if it is not performing up to expectations. I have no current plans to do this, but I can maintain control of the content and ownership of the domain.
2. SEO - Search Engine Optimization. Rumors abound that top level domains (TLDs) receive a higher ranking in searches. Whether or not it is true, and you will find people on both sides of the debate, it is a good move to take advantage of it.
3. Branding and Recognition. If my site is going to be called "Some Life", I should have a domain name that folks associate with that and is easily recognizable.

In summary, the process is fairly painless and reliable. Much more than previous experiences that I have had in the past moving sites. However, the failure of the pictures to move is a glaring issue, of which I am going to give Blogger another week to fix. If they do not, looks like I will need to go through the painful process of re-attaching them. Yuck!

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