How many blogs do you have? How many of them have a custom domain? What exactly is a custom domain?
Blogger, Wordpress and Typepad are certainly the most popular remote hosted blogging platform. Remote hosting means another person (the company having the blogging platform) hosts your blog free of charge. You do not need to pay for hosting somewhere else as long as you have your blog hosted with them.
One major characteristic of remotely hosted blogs is that they provide urls to blogs with their names attached to it. Blog urls can be in the form http://yourblog.xyz.com, where xyz represents the name of the blogging platform. Such names are termed subdomains, eg http://az-blogging-tips.blogspot.com
Are your blogs on blogger? Are you using subdomains for all your blogs? Why not choose your most favorite blog and give it a full custom domain name. Although there are many advantages of having a custom domain name for your blog, subdomains are still fine. As a matter of fact, a subdomain will never kill a blog or a blogger. However, if you have more than three blogs, then I guess you must be really very deep into this blogging stuff. Don’t you think it is time you give at least one of those blogs a custom domain name? If your blog is on blogger, you can still forward your subdomain to a full domain. All the traffic from your subdomain name will be redirected to the full domain you choose.
Forwarding and Redirection
In the precious paragraph, I have used two key words side-by-side. Is forwarding the same like redirecting? Lets say you have a blog with url yourblog.blogspot.com and you buy a domain name yourblog.com. if you redirect yourblog.com to yourblog.blogspot.com, someone visiting your blog through yourblog.com will still see yourblog.blogspot.com in the address bar. All links in your blog will still bear yourblog.blogspot.com for example yourblog.blogspot.com/how-to-blog.html
However, instead of redirecting yourblog.com to yourblog.blogspot.com, you decide to use forwarding, all links and addresses in yourblog.blogspot.com will be cahged to yourblog.com. so, instead of seeing a link like yourblog.blogspot.com/how-to-blog.html (which was your actual link), one will now see yourblog.com/how-to-blog.html
From the above, one can easily deduce that forwarding is a better option. Redirection is however still very important when used the other way round. Since most of your visitors know yourblog.blogspot.com and just a few know yourblog.com, it will make much sense if those who visit yourblog.blogspot.com are taken to yourblog.com. Without this, loosing traffic will be a guaranteed.
Now, how do you use a custom domain for your blogger blog?
- Search for a “suitable” and available domain name
- Register your domain through a trustworthy domain registrar
- Adjust your domain settings to be “compatible” with blogger
- Change your blogger settings to use the domain, and redirect your subdomain to the domain
Sounds easy in four steps, right? Now, let’s break things down.
Choosing a domain name for your blog: A suitable domain name will be one that contains a at least three of the characteristics mentioned below
- Short: In don’t think you are planning to use www.blogaboutfamilyandparenting.com I am not saying that is the worst domain name so far, but I believe you might want to rethink.
- Easy to remember: This ads more value to the first point above, but take note that www.blogaboutfamilyandparenting.com will be easier to remember than www.gqwkgd.com Trust me!
- Easy to pronounce: Look at the last domain name above. Difficult to pronounce, right? Maybe that is why it is difficult to remember.
- Easy to Spell out: If it is difficult to pronounce, how easy will it be to spell? If it has multiple spellings (US and UK English, for example www.photosaviour.com) which one will your visitors choose?
- Reflects the content of your blog: Who will choose www.weightlosstips.com for a strictly political blog?
- Is a top level domain (.com, .net, .org): Well, this might not have much weight, but .org immediately gives the impression of an organization.
After choosing a domain name, go ahead and register it with your favorite domain registrar. I will go for GoDaddy.com, NameCheap.com or ZoneEdit.com Nothing more..
Now that you have bought a domain name, you need to configure that domain name to point to your blog at blogger. All you need to do is to assign a certain property to it called CNAME. You must define a CNAME for that domain name with a host value of www and a destination value ghs.google.com. Blogger has a simple straightforward guide on how this can be done. Check it out here!
Now that you have assigned an alias (CNAME) for your domain you can proceed to your blog at blogger and change the settings so that it uses a custom domain instead of the usual subdomain.
To do this,
- go to your blog settings,
- click on publishing,
- click on custom domain
- click advanced settings,
- enter your domain name, and save
It can take between 24 and 72 hrs for the alias you created for your domain name to become active. With Zone Edit, it took me 5 minutes. Oh! Did I just say that? Yeah. When I moved this blog to blogger, I was using http://az-blogging-tips.blogspot.com for a while before I switched to my custom domain www.azblogging.com
Having a custom domain for at least one of your blogs can be real cool.
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Nice post.
How long did it take to Google to stop indexing the old blogspot posts and recognize their counterparts in the new post as “original”? On one of my blogs which I moved to custom, I still have top ranking results on blogspot pages which Blogger redirects anyway to the new posts (which Google still considers copies…)