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Improvements To The Blogger Spam Classification And Review Processes

Too many Blogger blog owners ask what is allowed, when they publish a Blogger blog.

Asking what is allowed is a waste of time. We have explained, repeatedly, that whitelisting of blogs is not possible.

It would be better to ask what is required, when requesting advice or assistance, in Blogger Help Forum: Something Is Broken.

Since the purpose of publishing a Blogger blog is to have content for people to read, what is required is unique content, that is composed to satisfy the targeted reader population.

Blogger TOS forbids hosting of spam content.
Spam blogs cause various problems, beyond simply wasting a few seconds of your time when you happen to come across one. They can clog up search engines, making it difficult to find real content on the subjects that interest you. They may scrape content from other sites on the web, using other people's writing to make it look as though they have useful information of their own. And if an automated system is creating spam posts at an extremely high rate, it can impact the speed and quality of the service for other, legitimate users.

If your blog uses content that's shared with other blogs and websites, it will be classified - righteously or spuriously - as a spam blog. If the blog is reviewed, judged to be spuriously classified, and restored to your control - and if you continue publishing shared content - you will be seen, righteously or spuriously, as a repeat offender.

Long ago, spam classification was a fuzzy process. The fuzzy techniques used made both false negative classifications, and false negative classifications, unavoidable. Recent tunings to the spam classification process appear to make classification much more reliable.

Blogger will continue to provide a forum based classification appeal and review process. Since the initial classification processes now appear to be more reliable, we may see less spurious classifications, reported in the forums. This may offer us opportunity to provide more in depth analysis of blog content, during some review requests.

It's possible that in depth content analysis, conducted during the review request, may provide useful examples to other blog owners, what is allowed - and what techniques should be avoided. Maybe this will help some blog owners to avoid making the same mistakes - and reduce later spurious spam classifications, and avoid damage to reputation.

This may be a win - win - win (blog owners - forum helpers - Blogger Support) situation. The only losers will be the intentional spammers, who will become more obvious.

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