Google’s Blogger just got a lot more flexible: It will now support custom domain names for your blog. “We’ll continue to host all your content as before, but it will be displayed at your new address,” promises a post at Blogger Help.
The post, which Murdok contributor Philipp Lenssen discussed on Google Blogoscoped, also points out that the update works “unlike FTP publishing, which requires you to buy both a domain name and a hosting service.”
The timing of this update is rather interesting, given the negative press that Google has encountered recently. As our own Joe Lewis wrote, there was a veritable “firestorm of negativity . . . concerning the company’s practice of advertising its own services as ‘tips’ in SERP pages queried by users.”
Joe’s article, written yesterday, then noted that, “at least for today, the company has put that practice on hold.” Now, one day later, the “hold” has continued, and Google may be trying to get back into everyone’s good graces with the Blogger update.
It’s also entirely possible that Google has been planning this update for days, weeks, or months, but what would Friday be without a conspiracy theory or two?
Either way, this people-pleasing update has been made available to the public. It may not work immediately-there’s a disclaimer that, “If your new domain isn’t taking you to your blog, wait another day or two, to make sure all the DNS servers have been updated”-but it’s there.
As a next-to-last point, “remember: you only need to get the domain name; you don’t have to pay extra for hosting service.” For anyone who would like to view the full set of Blogger Help instructions (which is a tidy 540 words long), it’s available here.
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Doug is a staff writer for Murdok. Visit Murdok for the latest eBusiness news.
