Official Web Master Blog

While Blogger's new commenting system has a lot of cool features, there's an important downside: Google+ Comments has nothing to do with Blogger.

The old comments are available in the new interface, but the new comments are not available in the old commenting system, if you decide to switch back. Blogger's comment feeds don't include the comments from the new interface, you can no longer manage comments from the Blogger dashboard and the new comments aren't included when you export your blog.

Here's the empty comment feed for a post that has a lot of comments:


When you switch to Google+ Comments, you outsource the comments to Google+, but Google+ doesn't have a section that lets you manage the comments and there's no way to export the new comments.

I don't know if you've notice, but this blog's comments look different. That's because I've switched to the new Google+ Comments feature for Blogger.


The upgraded commenting system preserves the existing comments, but the future comments require a Google+ account. That means, visitors can no longer post comments anonymously, using an OpenID account or using a Google account that hasn't been upgraded to Google+. When posting a comment, visitors can also share it on Google+. The new commenting system doesn't just show the comments posted on Blogger, it also shows all the Google+ messages that link to the post and their comments.

Just like Disqus, Google+ Comments shows by default the best comments and there's an option to show the most recent comments. It's not clear how Google determines the top comments, but the number of +1s could be one of the signals. You can also restrict the comments to the people from your Google+ circles.

Bloggers will notice some other changes: the comment management feature from Blogger is no longer available and you can only manage comments for each post. That's a significant downside, especially if you receive a lot of comments. When one of your posts receive new comments, you'll see a notification in the Google bar and you'll get an email notification. I haven't found a way to disable these notifications, not even from the Google+ settings page.

How to enable Google+ Comments if you have a Blogger blog? "Google+ Comments is available for Blogger users who have created a Google+ profile and connected it with their blog. If you haven't upgraded your Blogger profile to a Google+ profile and would like to, you can start the process by clicking the Google+ tab on the Blogger dashboard. Once your blogs are linked to a Google+ profile, a new 'Use Google+ Comments' setting will be displayed on the Google+ tab of your blog," explains Google. If your blog has a heavily modified template, you may need to reset widgets or use the code from this page.

There are additional limitations: Google+ Comments is not available for private blogs and for blogs with adult content. This means that the old commenting system will continue to be available as long as Blogger supports these kinds of blogs. You can always disable Google+ Comments and go back to the legacy Blogger commenting system.

It's important to point out that Google+ Comments are embedded as an iframe (the URL starts with https://plusone.google.com/_/widget/render/comments) and the comments are no longer included inside the Blogger page. Google manages to index content from iframes, but the change could affect your Google rankings.

Another interesting thing: it's the first time when the official Google Blog has comments.

Some early thoughts:

* Blogger is now more relevant, it's less likely that it will be discontinued in the next few years

* Blogger finally has a modern commenting system

* Google+ Comments will be available for other blogging platforms

* "sign in with Google+" will make Google+ even more popular as an identity service.

Until now, Blogger automatically generated the URL of a post using the first words from the title. If you want to customize the URL, there's a new "permalink" option in the "post settings" sidebar. When you create a post, click "permalink", enable "custom URL" and type the file name. You can only customize the file name (it's highlighted in the following example):

http://googlesystem.blogspot.com/2012/07/custom-blogger-url.html

... and you can only use alphanumeric characters, underscore, dash and period.


It's important to note that you can choose a custom URL only when you create a post and you can't change it later.

Why use this feature? Create shorter permalinks, use different keywords in the URL, improve search rankings. "A site's URL structure should be as simple as possible. Consider organizing your content so that URLs are constructed logically and in a manner that is most intelligible to humans," suggests Google.

As a side note, there's a mistake in the help center page for this feature: "Because Blogger automatically creates the URL from information from your post title, your URL would change should you decide to edit the title. This would result in broken links, and fewer visitors to your blog." That used to be a major annoyance in the pre-2006 Blogger, but it's no longer the case today.

Blogger blogs are no longer that limited. After adding support for static pages and favicons, Blogger added some new advanced features to the "search preferences" section of the settings page.

Now you can edit the description meta tag without editing the template. If you edit the description meta tag for the entire blog, you can also write descriptions for your blog posts. This is useful because Google's snippets sometimes rely on this meta tag.

For the first time you can create a custom 404 error page for a Blogger blog without buying a domain. Just "enter an HTML message that will be displayed on the Page Not Found page instead of the generic message." Google has some tips for creating useful 404 pages and there's even a widget powered by Google search that shows related links and a search box with appropriate search suggestions.

You can also create custom redirects, but only for internal URLs. For example, you can redirect http://googlesystem.blogspot.com/mailto to http://googlesystem.blogspot.com/2012/02/open-mailto-links-using-gmail-in-google.html. Make sure that you leave out the first part of the URL (http://googlesystem.blogspot.com) when you create the redirect.

There are also options for customizing the robots.txt page and robots header tags. It's probably a good idea to use Blogger's robots.txt page as a template (http://yourblog.blogspot.com/robots.txt) and only add some new pages you want to be ignored by search engines.

Google found an interesting trick to defend Blogger blogs against local laws: redirect readers to country-specific domains and only remove those URLs if required.

"Over the coming weeks you might notice that the URL of a blog you're reading has been redirected to a country-code top level domain, or 'ccTLD.' For example, if you're in Australia and viewing [blogname].blogspot.com, you might be redirected [blogname].blogspot.com.au. A ccTLD, when it appears, corresponds with the country of the reader's current location," explains Google.

"Migrating to localized domains will allow us to continue promoting free expression and responsible publishing while providing greater flexibility in complying with valid removal requests pursuant to local law. By utilizing ccTLDs, content removals can be managed on a per country basis, which will limit their impact to the smallest number of readers. Content removed due to a specific country's law will only be removed from the relevant ccTLD." That means [blogname].blogspot.com will continue to exist, but it's not clear if the users from that specific country will still be able to access it.

Blogger will start to use country-specific domains, just like many other Google services. If you're in Australia and visit google.com, you'll be redirected to google.com.au, but you can opt-out by clicking "Go to Google.com" or visiting google.com/ncr. The same option is available for Blogger: "Blog readers may request a specific country version of the blogspot content by entering a specially formatted NCR URL. NCR stands for 'No Country Redirect' and will always display [blogname].blogger.com in English, whether you're in India, Brazil, Honduras, Germany, or anywhere. For example: http://[blogname].blogspot.com/ncr – always goes to the U.S. English blog."

Google doesn't mention the list of countries that are affected by this change, but Techdows.com reports that India is one of them. Obviously, blog owners can use custom domains if they don't like the new feature. Even if Google made sure that the duplicate URLs are properly handled by search engines, it could be annoying to see so many URLs that send people to the same page.

{ Thanks, Venkat and Herin. }

Blogger's comment system has been updated and it now supports threading. You can now reply to a comment and read the entire conversation. "It is now much easier to differentiate between whether someone is making a general comment on the thread, or responding to another comment on the thread," informs Google.

The threaded view is only available for embedded comments and it requires to enable full-text blog feeds.


If you've manually customized your blog's template, you may not see the new feature. One way to solve this issue is to reset widgets. In the new Blogger interface, go to the Template tab, click "Backup/Restore" and download your template, then click "Edit HTML", "Proceed" and "Revert widget templates to default". If something doesn't look right, you can always go back to the old template by clicking "Backup / Restore" and uploading the template you've saved.

When you edit your Blogger profile, Blogger shows a message at the top of the page that says: "Connect Blogger to Google+: Use your Google profile and get access to upcoming Google+ features on Blogger". Unfortunately, the links seem to be broken, but both URLs reference profile switching.


It's obvious that Blogger profiles will be discontinued and replaced by Google Profiles, but it's not clear how Blogger will integrate with Google+. Maybe Blogger posts will automatically trigger Google+ posts and Blogger/Google+ comments will be synchronized. Friend Connect will be discontinued and Google+ could replace it. Friend Connect's goal was to "help site owners easily provide social features for their visitors. Users gain the ability to sign in to, make friends on, and interact with your site, making it more social and more dynamic". It wasn't successful, but Google+ has a better chance to make Blogger more social.

Update: Blogger's blog informs that this option is available if you use Blogger in Draft and it will be released in the regular Blogger interface in the coming weeks. For now, the only changes are that the Blogger profile redirects to the Google profile, the author's name is now obtained from Google Profiles and Google's snippets for the blog posts include information about authors: name, thumbnail and link to the profile. "If you blog under a pseudonym and do not want your blog to be associated with your real name, you should not migrate from a Blogger profile to a Google+ profile," suggests Google. If you change your mind after switching to the Google+ profile, you can revert to the Blogger profile.

{ Thanks, Herin. }

If you don't like Blogger's Dynamic Views, but your favorite blog enabled one of them, there's a way to go back to the previous template: just add &v=0 to the URL. For example, here's the URL for Gmail's blog: http://gmailblog.blogspot.com/?v=0.

Unfortunately, the change is not persistent and you need to add the parameter every time you visit the homepage or one of the posts. You can also bookmark the URL.

Last month, Blogger's team launched a Lightbox-like feature which was quickly removed after users started to complain. Blogger's Lightbox was automatically enabled for all the images from a post and blog owners couldn't disable it.

The feature is now back, it's still enabled by default, but you can disable it from Settings > Formatting by selecting "No" next to "Open images in Lightbox". If you use Blogger's new interface, the setting can be found in the "Post and comments" section. As Google explains, "If Yes is selected, when a reader clicks on an image in a post, it will be displayed in a slideshow-like overlay instead of leaving your page and navigating to the image."

The old interface:


The new interface:


{ via Blogger Buzz. Thanks, Petros. }