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

As of yesterday, Blogger has cancelled one more blog I had there. I got a very unpleasant surprise when I logged onto my acount only to see no blog displayed on my Dashboard. What’s interesting is the blog is still available for visitors but they blocked my access to it. Can it be that Blogger is just buggy to such an extent? If that’s the case, it’s about time they did something about it.

I normally use Firefox so I don’t see what’s happening in IE - but now I decided to check my blogs to see what they look like and was in for a very unpleasant surprise. The div’s aligned with CSS that Blogger uses in its standard templates are all messed up in IE.

To evaluate how bad this problem was, I checked my stats for visitors’ browsers and here’s what I got for just one of the blogs:

63.00% MSIE 6.0
20.00% Mozilla 5.0
6.00% Firefox 1.0.4
4.00% Firefox 1.0.6
2.00% Safari 1.2
1.00% Firefox 0.9
1.00% MSIE 5.5
1.00% Netscape 7.1
1.00% Firefox 1.0.5
1.00% Netscape 7.2

Out of all the visitors, different versions of Firefox account only for 12% of all visitors, while 64% run different versions of MSIE.

I am now facing some sleepless nights replacing the div’s with regular tables in those templates - and I should get to it soon. I’m losing AdSense clicks cause of this problem.

The templates Blogger offers look nice as templates even in IE - but once you start filling them with content things are immediately messed up. Your sidebar goes under the rest of content, etc. Just one more example of how Blogger screws up.

I have just realised something. When Blogger bans a blog, it wipes out everything related to it, right? Its template, its archive, its main page - nothing is accessible, and there’s nothing you can do about it. That is, in case the blog is hosted on Blogger’s server. But not in case it’s hosted on my own one! then, even if it’s banned, I still have all the posts in the archive and the blog itself and everything related to it on my own server. The only thing to be done is register a new blog on Blogger, apply the same template (you’d have it saved since you first started your blog if you’re smart enough), set it up to publish to your server - and voila! in a matter of 10 mins yur blog is recovered. You will of course want to backup the archives and everything you have on your server before directing the new one, so that it does not simply overwrite what you had and wipe it out. Once the blog is recovered it is easy to copy your backup into the new directories on the server, and that’s it. Really simple.

Has your Blogger blog ever been wiped out by Blogger? Was it hosted on Blogger server or on your own one? How often was it updated? How much traffic was it getting?

The reason why I am asking these questions is because I’m trying to collect some factual information on Blogger behavior as cancelling blogs has often been the case with Blogger recently. This is the main reason why I started my anti-Blogger campaign in the first place. Blogger thinks it owns our blogs and can do whatever it wants with them, but in the long run our blogs are OUR intellectual property, we put many hours of work into them, and of course we don’t want them cancelled, especially the way Blogger does, without any notification or explanation why. Is Blogger out of server space/bandwidth so badly it cannot afford hosting the most active and popular blogs? If that’s the case that should be their problem, not ours. Let us know in writing you can’t host more than a certain amount and we count on you but host our blogs elsewhere instead.

On the other hand, I am also interested in the information on whether Blogger ever wipes out the old/infrequently updated blogs, and if that’s the case, I’d like to find out how it defines whether a blog is still of importance to its owner or not.

Since Blogger has wiped out my blog twice in the past few months I am now forced to move to a real domain. I am going to start an anti-Blogger campaign. Those who would like to participate can do so by switching to WordPress and refusing to use Blogger as their host and blogging software.