Google drops blogspot.in domain, causing links havoc for hundreds of Thousands

Google has dropped the ownership of its .in domain for Blogspot, blogspot.in

It has resulted in over a hundred thousand backlinks getting into a jiffy, unreachable for Indian audience users explicitly.

Blogger was bought by Google in 2003, in a deal to expand in the publishing space.
When we tried looking into the domain by WHOIS lookup, the following information appeared.

Domain Name: blogspot.in
  Registry Domain ID: DE2DC9C0E8E694C28ADEF0F444F121B45-IN
  Registrar WHOIS Server:
  Registrar URL: www.domainming.com
  Updated Date: 2020-06-29T20:00:06Z
  Creation Date: 2020-06-24T20:00:05Z
  Registry Expiry Date: 2021-06-24T20:00:05Z
  Domain Status: inactive https://www.icann.org/epp#inactive

It looks like the domain has been picked up by another entity named Domainming, which seems like a hosting, domain provider at first glance.

Can the Blogs still be accessed with .in URLS?

You can access the blogs which have been bookmarked with Blogspot.in domain. All you need to do is change it from .in to .com.

For example, xyz.blogspot.in will now be xyz.blogspot.com

Country-Specific for a Brief period

In 2013, Blogger started redirecting readers from India to Blogspot.in for every blogspot blog using blogspot sub-domain.
It was not country-specific but points to Indian sub-domain when you visited blogspot blog and you were based in India. 

For instance, suppose you are a reader from New Delhi, India. You search for “Best home-made activities for Kids” in Google search. A blogger blog with the domain themamamartha.blogspot.com caught your eye in the search results.
You click on the blog’s result and get redirected to the site. The domain gets redirected to themamamartha.blogspot.in

However, Google decided to do away from country-specific domains in 2018 to simplify the URLs of the blog.

Speculations over the Issue

Twitter chatter amongst industry leaders have talked about the domain dropping being an accident, while others have considered it as a calculated move by the Big G.

ICANN, the international organization overseeing domains and the Internet in general has a policy for recovering lost domain names. Will Google use it and signify that dropped it was a mistake? Only time will tell.

Amaan Rizwan
Amaan Rizwan
Anything and everything because titles should not define us. A non-fiction lover. Khalid Hosseini and Ruskin Bond fan. Aspiring to be better than yesterday.

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