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.