Friday, January 25, 2008

Getting Rid Of An Infinite Loop On A Blogger Custom Domain

I had a couple people email me with a problem that can be hard to identify. Their CNAME records are correct, but when they type their URL in a browser their blog never loads and they never see a 404 error. What has happened in these cases, is that they have managed to setup and infinite loop of redirects from their domain back and forth from Blogger.

I'll illustrate how the problem arises:

  • Your domain has a CNAME setup for the www.yourdomain.com
  • Your primary domain (yourdomain.com) is set to either forward to your old Blogspot address or your www subdomain.
  • You set Blogger to publish to yourdomain.com - oops, big mistake. In addition to setting your Blogger to yourdomain.com, Blogger will have the default setting checked off to redirect www.yourdomain.com to yourdomain.com (since you have told Blogger to publish to yourdomain.com).
How it becomes an infinite loop:
  1. Entering www.yourdomain.com calls Google's servers as it should since you have a correct CNAME record entered.
  2. Blogger looks up the full domain in its DNS servers, finds that your blog is set to publish at yourdomain.com and tells your browser to head over to that URL instead.
  3. Since you setup domain forwarding on your primary domain (yourdomain.com) to point to your old Blogspot address and Blogger redirects all requests for the old URL to the correct custom domain, your browser is now told to go to yourdomain.com - where you just came from!!
  4. INFINITE LOOP!
The solution:
  • Enter the correct domain name in your Blogger custom domain settings. If you have a CNAME setup on www, you must enter www.yourdomain.com as your custom URL.

2 comments:

CS said...

I always feel a little bit insecure if I have to change dns-settings. So I'm asking precisely:
Do I understand it right that I have to go to my dns-settings? Do I have to go to "Edit host records" and have to change:
www ghs.google.com. CName(Alias)
to
www www.myname.com CName(Alias)

???

Afterwards...Do I have to wait 48 h or can I go directly to my settings in blogger and publish the new www.myname.com?

My problem was that I entered my new bought domain and it said... Domain is already taken... because I bought different domains thru this Google function.

CLYDE said...

I have this problem. I got a domain at 1and1.com and finally after 28 days! (their support sucks) I managed to make it point at my Blogger blog.
When I type http://moneyideas.us it shows my blog.
But when I type http://www.moneyideas.us it shows a parking page from Sedo.com.
What can I do so both domains point at my blog?
I don't care about the www, I simply want my domain to point at my blog!
Thank you
clyde at mail.gr

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