Major change made by Google in blogspot blogs

Google has made a significant change in blogger. Previously all blogger blogs were having a domain name as abc.blogspot.com like this blog was having domain name www.gadgetsmaniac4u.blogspot.com but now users visiting blogger blogs will be automatically redirected to their country specific domain for example if you are visiting this blog from India, you will see blog address as www.gadgetsmaniac4u.blogspot.in and if you are visiting it from UK then you will see the address as www.gadgetsmaniac4u.blogspot.co.uk. But Don’t worry if you are hosting your custom blog on blogger then you won’t be affected by it.  

Now the question is why is Google doing this? According to a recently added help page to “continue promoting free expression and responsible publishing while providing greater flexibility in complying with valid removal requests pursuant to local law”. Google explains the move with greater content removal flexibility as they can now manage those removals on a per country base to limit the “impact to the smallest number of readers” as content removed “due to a specific country’s law will only be removed from the relevant ccTLD”.

As far as I am concerned I don’t like this move by Google. It will create confusion among webmasters and visitors. Visitors may think the site has been moved or they are being redirected due to some sort of virus, because they haven’t seen any abc.blogspot.in or abc .blogspot.co.uk site before. For webmasters they might not lose traffic from Google but traffic coming from Yahoo, Bing or MSN may be adversely affected.Also bloggers may lose indexed pages by search engines other than Google.

Well, we can’t do anything against this move by Google. Just want to tell my users don’t get confused when you see a blogspot blog redirected to your country specific domain. This change is effective from past 4-5 days. Till now my blog’s traffic is not effected but we will have to wait for some more time before coming to any conclusion.