Millions Of Websites Affected As Google Lost Ownership Of Blogspot.in Domain

09/07/2020

The URL blogspot.in is part of Google-owned Blogger, previously known as Blogspot that Google acquired back in 2003.

The top-level domain name '.in' that comes after 'blogspot' is to represent a country-specific domain. It isn't different from the regular blogspot.com, but just a redirect for users in India. What this means, when users search for a blog in India, the users will be prioritized to access blogspot.in instead of the more general blogpost.com

Country-specific URLs were brought about by Blogger in February 2013. This was done so Blogger could remove content that violate local laws.

So for example, if the company receives a request to remove content that violates local law, Blogger can quickly make the content inaccessible to readers on the local domain where the laws apply.

Blogging has become both a trend and a profit-making business for many active bloggers around the world, including in India.

And here, it was discovered that Google somehow lost the ownership of blogpost.in

A screenshot of Who.is lookup shows that blogspot.in is no longer owned by Google.
A screenshot of Who.is lookup shows that blogspot.in is "inactive" and no longer owned by Google.

As a result of this, millions of blog pages are inaccessible to many users in India.

Webmasters and those who post on the platform are experiencing issues in getting access to their own blogs.

Bloggers however, can still access their blogs through blogspot.com. The blogs and their pages are also accessible by changing the URL to the said domain.

But at this time, users browsers won't automatically redirect to the working URL, requiring users to manually type in the URL.

Before Google addresses the problem, millions of bloggers in India are affected.