After You Publish Your Blog To A Custom Domain, Should You Update Internal Links?

One interesting question, which comes up from time to time in Blogger Help Forum: How Do I?, is about Custom Domain Publishing - and what to do, after Transition completes.

Now that my blog is successfully transitioned to the domain URL, should I update the internal blog links, in the post contents?

This is a question that deserves some thought. From an aesthetic sense, it makes sense to do this - hoping that you will be paying for the domain, for eternity. But, is it worth the effort?

There are several issues, which may be relevant, when considering updating internal blog links.

Remember that updating the internal links is a manual effort - this has to be done on a post by post basis.

• How much time do you have to spend, updating the link URLs?
• How much effort will this take? How many old posts do you have, with how many internal links?
• How likely are you to go ever back to the BlogSpot URL?

Remember that one of the features of custom domain publishing is the DNS Based redirect, of the BlogSpot URL, to the domain published URL. This is an automatic feature, it's total and immediate - and it will continue to work, only as long as the domain continues to work.

New posts will use the updated published URL, and the domain.

As you continue to publish posts in your blog, your new internal links will use the domain URL - unless you manually convert each one, as you edit each post.

If you ever opt to publish back to BlogSpot, all of the links, pointing to the domain URL, will be problems - when the domain stops redirecting. If you spend time manually updating each link now, that's the same amount of time that you'll have to spend reverting the updated links, when you publish back to BlogSpot.

The BlogSpot URL will redirect to the domain, forever.

Remember that your BlogSpot URL continues to operate, forever - regardless of the domain published URL.

From what I can tell of the DNS infrastructure used by custom domain published blogs, the domain DNS settings are cached locally, for all readers of any given custom domain. If the BlogSpot to domain redirect is similarly cached, it's unlikely that there are any reader experienced performance issues, from people reading blogs and clicking on BlogSpot targeted internal links, that redirect to custom domain URLs.

Other than the aesthetic issues, updating internal links may not be necessary.

As far as I can tell, when thinking about this carefully, there is no real reason - other than aesthetics - to ever update the BlogSpot based internal links, to directly point to the domain URL. Spend your time, after Transition has completed, profitably. Work on the blog, and get it re indexed, under the new URL.