I’m on a war path with Google Analytics. That’s probably nothing new to those who read my lengthy Google Analytics post about how it works and most importantly what it doesn’t do and how it doesn’t reflect your traffic accurately. I’ve been trying to educate bloggers and PR people alike about this issue, but so far to no avail. But I’m not going to give up.

Another issue has now crystalised in the past few days for Google and Google Analytics, and that’s got to do with Blogger enforcing localised Blogspot addresses. “Localised Blogspot addresses?” I hear you say. Let me explain what it is first.

Before, all blogs on Blogspot/Blogger had a “username.blogspot.com” address format, right? My blogspot address was msdriftedsw.blogspot.com. But now, to enforce some country-based legislations (or something along those lines), the ending of the Blogspot address now is controlled by where you are. Say you are in the UK. If you type in a blogspot.com. address into your address bar, you’ll see seconds later that the ending changed to .co.uk. If you are in Germany, it’ll end on .de, if you are in Australia, it’ll be .com.au, etc. Only those in the US will continue to see the .com ending. It’s got to do with where you are based in the world. Hurrah for them ;-)

Of course for your visitors it doesn’t make too much of a difference, because they will still type in your Blogspot address and probably won’t even necessarily notice that the address in their browser’s address bar changed slightly. And it doesn’t screw up those who have custom domains either. That all stays the same.

But the issue is for those who track their traffic through Google Analytics (for personal or monetizing reasons). I discussed before that Google Analytics only tracks the traffic for the address/url that it’s set up for. If you’re Google Analytics code is set up for your blogspot.com address, it will now not pick up the traffic that comes from outside the US because for everyone non-US based the address will change to the localised Blogspot address.

And there is no real fix to this, unfortunately. There is a bit of code that can suppress the ending change visually, but it won’t do any difference to Google Analytics not picking up traffic accurately. Here’s how to install the code if you do wish so (thanks to Faye Marie from Girl does Geek)

Step 1: Go to Blogger > Design/Template > Edit HTML
Step 2: Press Ctrl+F and type “” (without the “” symbols) – you will only find it once
Step 3: Right above that line that has “” in it, paste the following code into it:

Step 4: Click ‘Save’

I’d stick to Blogger Stats (because they pick up traffic to your blog regardless of what address your visitors access it from, including custom domains). But even Blogger Stats isn’t 100% accurate (I’ll explain this in another post soon I hope), but at least it doesn’t run on JavaScript (which is another main reason why Google Analytics and also StatCounter are traffic inaccurately as many users disable JavaScript on their web browsers manually or through adblockers and then aren’t tracked).

More importantly, this localised Blogspot address crap is REALLY screwing with Google and its search methodology and PageRank, SEO and all of that jazz. Basically for Google‘s search crawlers, your blog exists multiple times now under the Blogspot-type addresses. And Google crawlers don’t like that, because they think that you’re creating duplicated content to artificially improve your coming up in searches and punish you for that by not listing you at all in search results (and that will obviously affect your traffic too).

Here’s a bit of code that’s supposedly fixing that issue too (again, thanks to Faye Marie from Girl does Geek):

Step 1: Go to Blogger > Design/Template > Edit HTML
Step 2: Press Ctrl + F and type in “” (without the “” symbols) – you will only find it once
Step 3: Right below that line with “” in it, paste the following:

Step 4: Click ‘Save’

So while your Google Analytics stats won’t be fixed, at least you won’t have any future issues with confused visitors and your search results and ranking should remain the same.

Hope this helps xx