This article was published on July 8, 2020

Millions of sites are inaccessible as Google appears to have lost control of blogspot.in


Millions of sites are inaccessible as Google appears to have lost control of blogspot.in

If you have a blog on Google’s Blogger site in India, you might want to check it. Millions of blog pages are inaccessible at the moment as Google seems to have lost control of “blogspot.in” URLs.

To be clear, the blogs are still online, and you can access them by changing ‘blogspot.in‘ to ‘blogspot.com‘ in the URL — currently, your browser won’t be automatically redirected to the working URL.

Running a WHOIS query for the URL reveals Google no longer owns the domain. We’ve contacted the National Internet Exchange of India, which controls the “.in” registry for comment, and will update this piece accordingly if we hear back.
Whois lookup for blogspot.in

According to the above screenshot, there’s been an update in the registry last month. But it’s not clear exactly when Google lost control of the domain.

Whatever the reason might be, if I host a site or blog with Google, I would expect a company of this size to keep up and know when their domain name ownership expires. This might be just a temporary issue, but it also raises the question of Google’s commitment to Blogger.

We’ve asked the company for more details, and we’ll update the story if we hear back.

If you use a blog regularly, an alternative is to host it on your own domain. But everyone might not want to do that just to keep things easy. And you’d expect Google Webmaster to do better. If your current blog is on the “blogspot.in” domain, you’ll just have to weather the storm for now.

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