Country-specific Blogspot URL may affect your earnings - and other things too

This week, Blogger announced they are redirecting blogspot.com blogs to country specific URLs.

This means that when someone in India looks at http://blogger-hints-and-tips.blogspot.com/, they will actually be directed to http://blogger-hints-and-tips.blogspot.in - and similarly for other countries, so far I know it's been applied to Australia and New Zealand too.

This is likely to have affects on other products:

AdSense:

If you have protected your AdSense ID from malicious use (and really, you should if you care about it), then you will find some new entries in your unauthorised sites list: I just went into mine and authorised

blogger-hints-and-tips.blogspot.com.au
blogger-hints-and-tips.blogspot.in
blogger-hints-and-tips.blogspot.co.nz

and I expect to be doing some more as it rolls out further.

If I didn't do this, then any advertising "clicks" from people visiting via country-specific-URLs won't be counted.

(Interestingly, I tried using the authorise link beside the unauthorized links on the Home > Account settings page. It said it worked, but those sites weren't actually added to my authorized list. I had to add them to the Authorized list and click Save myself.)

Analytics:

I'm not sure yet if this has an impact on statistics gathered with Analytics. Maybe not - my overall visitor numbers aren't down, and the Visitors > Map overlay tool shows that I've had 79 visits from India today.

I do have some more checks in mind, but these will take a while to do - comments from anyone who has investigated are very welcome.

3rd party statistics packages:

I don't know for sure, but would be surprised if this doesn't affect the stats gathered by SiteMeter, StatCounter, et al - at least in the short term.

Search

Nitecruzr has explained how Blogger's use of a canonical statement makes sure that the search engines only index our blogs under one address.

The way to check that you've got a canonical statement in your template is to

View the blog itself (ie not the template, and not the posts)
- eg I looked at www.blogger-hints-and-tips.blogspot.com in my browser, while I was logged off of Blogger.
Look at the source code (in Chrome, I get to it through the "wrench" in the top right corner, then Tools > View Source - or by using Ctrl / u)
Check that this line is showing somewhere:
<link href='http://yourURL.blogspot.com' rel='canonical'/>

If that line isn't in your source code, then the quickest fix is to either change to a newer template, or edit your template and add it just underneath the <head> statement.

That's all I can think of for now ... but I have a hunch there's more. Will post again if I find more issues.