Only custom hosted domains are exempt from the change. Why is Google doing this? According to a recently added help page to “continue promoting free expression and responsible publishing while providing greater flexibility in complying with valid removal requests pursuant to local law”. Google explains the move with greater content removal flexibility as they can now manage those removals on a per country base to limit the “impact to the smallest number of readers” as content removed “due to a specific country’s law will only be removed from the relevant ccTLD”.

The company notes that users who want to visit the original domain name can do so by accessing blogspost.com/ncr for that. It is not clear if this can also be attached to deep links, or if it only works to access the root domain of a particular blog.

It is definitely a confusing move both from a webmaster and site visitor perspective. Especially site regulars may think that something’s not right with the site if they are redirected automatically. Some may even believe that they are redirected by a hacked site or computer virus.

What’s your take on this development? Lets discuss it in the comments. (via Techdows)

It is also not clear if users who are locked out of the country domain can access the ncr version of the site, or if they are blocked from accessing that version as well. It is however likely that Google will first check the country of origin before making the redirect, which would suggest that users would be blocked from accessing ncr versions if the blog is blocked in their country.

Blog owners on the other hand may fear that the change will impact their search engine rankings or visibility. Google will make use of the rel”canonical” tag to prevent search engines from indexing different country versions of the same blog or post. It is however still possible that some webmasters will notice negative effects of the change.

The only official information that I could find was an article entitled How to Backup a Blogger Blog which required some manual work and a download manager to download the images.

A far superior solution is Blogger Backup which can be run from the local computer. I was not able to find compatibility information but it runs fine on Windows XP with service pack 3. It definitely requires the Microsoft .net Framework.

The process itself is pretty simply. Just provide a username and password to a Blogger account and the software will automatically identify all blogs that are managed by the user.

The user can then pick a blog from the list and the program will pull some information from Blogger about that blog. Several options are provided including the ability to include comments in the backup and the format (Atom one file, Atom multiple files) of the backup.

It’s also possible to define a post limit either by selecting a date range or the latest xx posts only for backup. Posts cannot only be backed up but also restored. The