The Blogger Country Code Aliases, And Search Engine Reputation

Many blog owners take great pride in publishing a blog that's read by many readers, and that is held in high esteem by the search engines.

Some owners have even installed various badges on their blogs, which automatically retrieve the Page Rank achieved by the blog, as distributed at the most recent Page Rank calculation. Recently, we've been seeing cries of anguish, in Blogger Help Forum: Something Is Broken.

I lost my Page Rank! My blog, as a ".com", had PR of 2 - but as ".in", it has 0! Woe is me!!

These owners do not understand that search engine reputation is still calculated and indexed using the ".com" alias.

If you are in Australia, and you're now viewing your blog as "myblog.blogspot.com.au" (with PR of 0), use the "no country redirect" URL modifier, and view the blog as "myblog.blogspot.com/ncr".

Your Page Rank badge should pop back up with the correct PR number, once again. Unfortunately, this won't do anything for your readers, who are now viewing the blog as "myblog.blogspot.co.nz", "myblog.blogspot.in", or what ever alias is relevant to their location.

If your PR badge uses the displayed URL (and is affected by the country code aliasing) - and if you're worried that your readers will be unduly influenced by seeing that they are now viewing a blog with PR of 0 - you're going to need a different PR badge, to decorate your blog.

Try and find a Page Rank badge / calculator that either

• Observes the "canonical" tag in the blog header.
• Lets you hard code the blog URL (so you can continue to specify "myblog.blogspot.com").

Blog accessories, and search engines, which blindly use the viewed URL - and ignore the "canonical" tag" - will be a problem, under the Blogger country code based redirects.