Website Getting Redirected to Blogger: What's Up With That?

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Written by Dan Schaefer

A friend of mine contacted me via email this morning and had an interesting problem to solve. Until about a year ago, he had a personal blog at Blogspot (now Blogger), where he posted a lot of content. For the sake of argument, the blog’s URL address was www.xyz.blogger.com. At the time, he had the basic URL www.xyz.com reserved through another server, but he decided to use the blogger URL instead because of its ability to get him blogging without the hassle.

About a year ago, he took a hiatus and did not post any content. In fact, he pulled down all the content on his Blogger site, and the whole blogging experience was put on hold.

Now he wants to begin blogging again, but he prefers to NOT use the Blogger site, but would rather use the www.xyz.com site instead. The problem was, however, that every time he put the www.xyz.com address into his browser, he somehow ended up back at the old Blogger site, which by this time, had nothing but a blank page.

“How could this be?” he asked in his email. He suspected that the Internet was somehow steering all traffic from his server-based www.xyz.com to www.blogger.xyz.com. He thus sent me the email and asked me to look into it.

The first thing I did was repeat his actions; that is, I entered his www.xyz.com address into my browser and verified that indeed, I ended up at the Blogger location.

So here’s the situation so far: Going to www.xyz.com resulted in the browser going to www.blogger.xyz.com.

Here are two simple tools in my arsenal I used to sort this out:

Ping. I simply pinged the addresses and saw where the packets were going. The thing about Ping is that it is an ICMP (Internet Control Messaging Protocol) that does not follow redirects. It lives at “Layer 3” in the OSI protocol stack, and it is thus immune to any higher level instructions, like redirects. When I pinged the URL addresses for both www.xyz.com and www.bloger.xyz.com, I ended up with two very different IP addresses. This confirmed my suspicion that there was an HTML redirect operation taking place at www.xyz.com.
GoDaddy. I often use GoDaddy as a simple tool to find out where a particular URL address is registered. To do this, I went to the GoDaddy website and entered the URL as shown in figure 1. Then I hit the “Go” button. As I suspected, GoDaddy informed me that the URL address was NOT available. As shown in figure 2, I then hit the “Get Info” tag in order to find out who really owned the site. In the next screen, I verified that my friend’s name and contact information appeared as the registered owner, and the website server for this URL happened to be located at GoDaddy itself.


Figure 1: Using GoDaddy to get information on a URL (click for more detail)	Figure 2: Getting registration information for a URL (click for more detail)

Why go through all this trouble? At first, I was afraid that Blogger owned both the www.xyz.blogger.com URL as well as the www.xyz.com URL. Had this been the case, then the “ping” operation would have revealed the same IP address for both URLs. This is not necessarily a problem, but it would have been more trouble to wrestle the www.xyz.com URL from Blogger, designate a separate hosting server and retrain all DNS servers to correctly resolve www.xyz.com.

As it turned out, all my friend had to do was turn off the “redirect” feature at the GoDaddy server, and then his www.xyz.com URL was no longer sent to the Blogger location, and life was good.

Once I informed my friend about the redirection, he initially said he did not remember authorizing GoDaddy to redirect to Blogger, but then a while later - after he contacted the support folks at GoDaddy - he said something like, “Oh yeah. I must have done that and forgotten about it. Thanks!”

Bottom line is that it pays to know a little bit about how the Internet handles traffic. When it comes to routing traffic in the Internet, every mystery can be solved. The question is how much time you want to invest in finding the answer. In this case, I got lucky and only had to invest about two minutes of my time to become a hero in the eyes of a good friend.

Best,

Dan

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