Irishwonder’s Black Hat SEO Blog A blog about blackhat, general SEO issues and other things related to the life on the web

Google’s official blog was deleted by their own folks. Any wonder regular Blogger blogs get deleted?

Even though Blogger blogs have been undergoing a lot of changes recently it still causes people who use it quite soem headache. One recent example: even people as well known as Mike Grehan fall victim to a Blogger template acting up. Check out this post of his - which in itself is an excellent post with a lot of insight, but it is hardly readable in Firefox. (I have posted about Blogger template problems in different browsers a while ago - in my case, it was IE though.)

While Mr. Grehan’s post contains a lot of interesting and discussable points, the comments to the post are a great example of, so to say, “post hijacking”, even though it wasn’t intentional - half the people commenting talk about the template problem. From this point of view of view, it is interesting to see how Aaron Wall handles both issues - he mentions the template problem while giving a lot of thought to all the informative content of the post

I have seen it some time ago but thought I’d mention it here now - it is a blog fully dedicated to this topic. The owner explores the isues of Blogger censorship in-depth and tries to collect all facts available as well as the opinions of both sides. Here it is: Censorship by Blogger.

Those of you who use Blogger blogs for different purposes like blog&ping, beware of the new danger from Blogger. Seems that it’s deleting newly created accounts if after a blog has been created it’s not been posted to for some time. I have no details about this all yet and haven’t been able to research it in depth but one blog that has been created a couple days ago and nothing has been posted to it up to now has become a victim of this. The blog itself is still out there but the account has been evidently cancelled as when logging into it Blogger says the account does not exist. Of course I’m talking of Blogger blogs hosted on Blogger’s server. One more evidence of Blogger running out of space….

Looks like with the introduction of Google blog search, Blogger will lose its value as an aid for faster Google indexing. Google blog search FAQ says:

Your results include all blogs, not just those published through Blogger

and even

The goal of Blog Search is to include every blog that publishes a site feed (either RSS or Atom). It is not restricted to Blogger blogs, or blogs from any other service.

What Google also plans on is providing a submission form for people to submit blogs not yet indexed by their blog search service:

How do I get my blog listed?

If your blog publishes a site feed in any format and automatically pings an updating service (such as Weblogs.com), we should be able to find and list it. Also, we will soon be providing a form that you can use to manually add your blog to our index, in case we haven’t picked it up automatically. Stay tuned for more information on this.

It is still not clear whether it will go as far as providing an option to ping Google’s server when a blog is updated, and from the previous experience we’ve had with Google Sitemap, it is not quite clear if this service will be safe for blackhat blogs/sites.

As for the RSS feed Google provides for the search results in Blog Search, there is no explicit permission to use it for “commercial” purposes, but at the same time there is no explicit statement saying commercial use of the feed is prohibited. The FAQ only mentions using it with an aggregator:

Can I subscribe to search results?

Yes. At the bottom of each page of search results you can find several links, offering the top 10 or 100 results as either Atom or RSS feeds. Just grab the links from here and subscribe to them in the news aggregator of your choice and you will get updates whenever new posts are made that match your query.

Is it going to be a new backdoor for getting indexed by Google? Time will tell how effective the new service will turn for speeding up the indexing, but it definitely is an interesting new subject for further research and experimenting for the SEOs, white hat and black hat alike.

Yes they are. How do I know? - They still haven’t put the flag button on their blog! If they did, they would have probably gotten a record number of hits on it

Meanwhile, they go on explaining what they actually meant by introducing that dreaded button, which is all no better than the original idea. Will go into deeper analysis of people’s opinion on Flag button later on, will suffice to say now many don’t like it or find the concept misleading.

Found this on this blog and loved it:

…It might be quite humorous if a ton of bloggers marked the Blogger buzz page as offensive. I’m not saying you should go do that, because you can think for yourself. But, maybe they’ll get the hint. Of course they’re too chicken to republish that blog so that we can see the flag button. Instead you could (but again, I’m not saying you should, I’m saying you could) email them a bunch of times to remind them how much you hate this new feature and why.

Lovely

I repost here the comment I have made on this blog as the original post made me think of more facets to this story and I think this is really important as well:

As I see it, it will only too often lead to completely legitimate blogs being removed/unlisted without a warning, especially since there’s no way for a blog owner to see if his/her blog has been flagged and home many times, and I suspect blogger itself hasn’t decided yet how many times a blog should be flagged to take action on it.

Re: “For example, could a pro-choice blog be taken down by an organised anti-abortion email campaign of “visit this blog and flag it”?” - imagine a worse possibility, an eejit with too much spare time on his hands surfing from blog to blog and flagging everything he sees simply for fun - lovely eh? It doesn’t take a campaign or a spammer to cause trouble so.

Re: “carrying the navbar is a small price to pay for free hosting, particularly as the alternative would probably be carrying advertising” - I have news for you. Even without the bar, you’re still carrying Blogger’s ad on your blog - look at your sidebar and there’s the button there that by TOS you’re not supposed to remove either. I didn’t mind the toolbar the way it was but the “Flag” button is definitely more than I’d like to see on my blogs.

All in all, this looks either as a very poorly thought out attempt to get the users to do Blogger’s work for free - without thinking what might come out of it and weighing all the pros and cons - or the beginning of censorship in the Internet - something I’d hate to see ever happen…

This is kind of a follow-up to the previous post. I have researched the issue of Bloggr’s new “flag” button a bit deeper and this is what I’ve found out.

First of all, although formally Blogger is owned by Google these are two separate entities more or less independent in their operation - so a blog getting flagged and unlisted by Blogger doesn’t mean anything as to it getting indexed/ranked in Google itself. Secondly, as the Blogger’s help article on the Flag button points out,

This means the blog won’t be promoted on Blogger.com but will still be available on the web — we prefer to keep in mind that one person’s vulgarity is another’s poetry. Or something like that.

After some more reseach, I have noticed that the “Flag” button indeed only appears on the newly updated blogs, while those that haven’t been updated recently still don’t have it in their toolbar. Which of course means that all the abandoned blogs are there to stay - well done Blogger folks. If you were running out of space and cancelling blogs for that reason (like I suggested in one of my previous posts), this is definitely not a solution to your problem.

Meanwhile, the Blogger folks leave it to themselves to decide your blog’s life if they choose to do so:

For more serious cases, such as spam blogs or sites engaging in illegal activity, we will continue to enforce our existing policies (removing content and deleting accounts when necessary).

As a sidenote, imagine some eejit with a bit too much time on their hands just browsing from blog to blog clicking “Flag” on each one - how will Blogger handle that?

Came across this post on Google’s new policy regarding Blogger blogs:

…the folks over at Google have announced a half-arsed effort to appease recent critics of their inaction over spam blogs by launching a new option for Blogspot blogs titled “Flag As Objectionable”.

The next time your reading a blogspot.com hosted blog that’s been recently created (it only applies to new blogs), you can know tell Google if you don’t like it and if they get enough complaints they’ll either “delist” the blog from the “Next blog” option found at the top of blogspot hosted blogs, or if they deem its really serious, god help us, they might even ban it. So basically get enough people together to target a site you don’t like on Blogger now and Google will help make sure no one gets to see it…that’s right, because they’ve also included “politically incorrect, potential hurtful, or just plain gross” in the criteria, but chances are if you’ve got a spam blog you’ll be totally unaffected.

Considering the percentage of B&P blogs on Blogger, and the percentage of abandoned blogs, chances are B&P folks are still safe. Besides, this obviously doesn’t affect Blogger blogs hosted elsewhere. Oh yeah, and there was nothing there about Blogger cancelling the blogs in question. From the general point of view of regular blogging folks though, the “politically incorrect” part sounds fishy… so should somebody not like your opinion on some touchy topic and you’re doomed? Where’s my freedom of speech and how different is this from censorship?