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For DI Readers in China, Iran, Pakistan, Syria Where Blogspot is Blocked

Ken Wong writes - "I'm in China and can't access blogspot.com directly, so i use pkblogs.com to read your blog. Today the pkblogs or inblogs.net link says that DI is a banned blog. What happened ?"

Like Ken, a lot of our readers based in countries like China, Pakistan, etc (where blogspot.com is blocked by government) use the excellent pkblogs.com service to read this blog. The service has also been a big help during the blogspot ban in India last July.

But as some of you would have guessed, we recently requested the pkblogs.com developers to remove our blog from their system and they immediately acted.

Now if you are left wondering why we raised such a request when the service was actually helping people read this blog, here are the two main reasons:

Reason 1 - Search Engines Penalize Duplicate Content: For every article posted on Digital Inspiration, there were two mirror webpages created immediately - one on the pkblogs.com domain and the other on inblogs.net - both these duplicate pages were indexed by the search engines in the same way as our main webpage.

There was a risk involved since search engines generally penalize websites with duplicate content. Plus it was creating clutter on the web.

Reason 2 - Adsense Earnings Could be Affected: Since we monetize this blog via Adsense, Google Ads were shown to users even if the webpages were opened indirectly via the inblogs or pkblogs' hyperlink.

Now Google has this smart pricing algorithm meaning if you are displaying Google Ads on a number of websites, even one low-performing website can cause Google to lower the ad prices (CPM) of all sites in your account.

This was again a big risk to our revenue stream since pkblogs.com/labnol or inblogs.net/labnol were showing Google ads with our Publisher ID.

So what's the alternative for users in China or Pakistan ? We have now switched to full feeds meaning you can read the entire blog post in any of your RSS readers.

And if RSS is greek to you, just type this URL in the browser to read the blog. You will however miss the visitor comments.

Related: How to Access Blocked Webpages in School or At Work ?

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