A Blog Hijack?

I wrote Stolen Computers several months ago. I have been expecting that this moment would come, sooner or later. I'm still not convinced that it's as obvious as it appears, nor that I have any part of it described in my article. But that's why I'm here - I'm learning as I go.

I'm going to quote this story from the relevant posts in Blogger Help Group: Something Is Broken Blogs have been hijacked. . ....

• The original post by Margie, 10/17.
  

  
  I received an email from blogger saying that my account had been cancelled because I violated the TOS. However, there was no explanation at all. I had blogs that were not linked to websites at all. Instead of pointing out the offending blog, they took out all of my blogs. On Thursday Oct 12th, I went into my sites and double checked them all to make sure everything was working. I added an affiliate or two, a few links and a sign up form (only on my job search blog) for people to sign up for a free job search ezine. I added a picture of the ebook I am promoting, but only to that site. The only other thing that I did new was join a subscription site called article builder. Article builder adds their own articles to your site automatically. I thought I'd try it because the articles are interesting and appropriate to job search. On Friday, Oct 13th, am EST, my blogs were all gone. . . mind you, this was after being told several days before that they were sorry that they had tagged my blogs as spam.
  
  Now, I read the TOS at least 5 times and could not find any reason whatsoever that I violated anything. I asked other people. No one can understand. My other hosting accounts don't understand. I have seen blogs out there there that light up like Christmas trees with advertisements everywhere. I have seen blatent sex sites being let through on blogs. My blog contains solid job search advice and articles providing job search advice. Yes, my blogs link to any appropriate websites that I have and I only have 4 or 5 websites right now. Not all of them have blogs either.
  
  When I pulled up the cache for jobsearchtop10.blogspot.com, I saw my first page. When I typed in the url, I was taken, after a brief delay, to anther site which I outlined in my earlier post. I saw that google had last visited the site on Oct 7th and there was a strange statement saying that my blog had been flagged. I had no idea what that meant. Now I know.
  

  
  
• A second post by Margie, with more details, 10/20.
  

  The article builder is a program you sign up for. You have a password to get into the site. Once you are into the site, you choose private label articles that are on topic for your site, click on your choice to upload the articles to your websites, wordpress, blogger for example. When you click on blogger you have to enter your blogger password. Then you are taken to the articles that you want to upload, you set the number of days you want it uploaded for whether it be daily, weekly, monthly, etc. save that and then the article builder does the rest. They explained upfront that blogger may consider the articles to be spam at first and that is why you have to type in a security code. They tell you to go into your blogger account for a day or two, submit the blog to the blogger team (click on the question mark), the blogger team will review it and approve it when they see it is a quality article related to your site.

  
  
• An interesting analysis by Kayakto, 10/30.
  

  i make an "article site" - really just a collection of all availaible public domain articles. I tell people that they can post them on their blogs automatically. Of course I know that blogger knows my IP and that blogger knows that Im just a spammer. So what happens - blogger marks all blogs that use my service as spam. I then tell my "users" to use this tool on blogger.com that you type captcha and blogger.com verifyes blog as not spam. My "user" does it on his account, with his email - blogger employee visits the blog, sees it's fine, marks the blog as "not spam". Thank you my "user" for giving me your blog, now marked as not spam for free. Say goodbye to your account. From what I know this guy is making at least 20 bucks from every 100 visitors you had.
  

  
  

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