The Real Blogger Status

I said earlier DO NOT Delete Your Blog. I will now add to that advice.
DO NOT Rename Your Blog.

At least, do not rename your blog using the simple Dashboard procedureSettingsPublishingType in new name for "Blog*Spot Address"
as suggested by Blogger For Dummies.

Why? Redirect Trouble Renaming your blog, without leaving a stub behind, is the same as deleting your blog. The old name is available to the spammers. If you decide, in the future, that the old name was better, you'll likely find that name unavailable.

We know the bad guys are actively hijacking deleted blogs, to recycle the search engine visibility that they have gathered.
From the problems discovered to date, it's pretty certain that they are using automated techniques - not just searching by hand.
It's pretty likely that any computers being used for the searching are hijacked, ie bots.
The reliablity of individual bots is pretty low. Bots are Lossy. At any time, a botted computer might be:Cleaned up by th…

By adding a Google sitemap to your blog, you can more easily submit your site for indexing, to the Google search engine spider.

You get better coverage by the spider, than by simply submitting your blog to the Google search engine. You'll also get detailed statistics about how Google sends traffic your way, and how the Google spider sees your blog.

Today, Blogger seems to be up.

But try posting to Google Blogger Help.

The latest post there is about 3 hours old now.


When trying to post a reply, I get an error bidding me to email groups-support@google.com.
That gives me botmail.

Thank you for taking the time to write us. If you have questions or feedback about Google Groups, please visit our Help Center, which will provide you with quicker answers to your questions. The Google Groups Help Center is located at http://groups-beta.google.com/support. After searching and browsing the Help Center, if you'd still like to contact us, please click on the contact link at the bottom of the Help Center, select the topic that best describes your question, and send us a message.

(SNIP)

Regards,
The Google Team

I filled out a second form at http://groups-beta.google.com/support/bin/request.py, and got back more botmail.

Thank you for your interest in Google Groups Beta. We're actively developing this service and your feedback is important to us. …

Post Body
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And I appreciate your willingness to help.

Blogs falsely identified as spam are a real problem in the Blogger world.

But genuine spam is a worse problem. The Register has two articles on this issue, Porno blog spam turns nasty and Google bug blocks thousands of sites.

If you've been seeing your visit counts drop recently, as I have, now you know why. Also, when you search your blog, and get an error "...entry cannot not be found...", you may be seeing a side effect of this problem.

The thing is, the effects of spam blogs, aka splogs, are hurting us in several ways.

Some of us have legitimate blogs, that are being incorrectly identified as splogs. In some cases, the blogs are deleted or disabled. We have to waste time getting Blogger to restore or re enable them. This wastes our time, and Blogger Support's time. Real, urgent, problems aren't being dealt with, because Blogger Support is busy dealing with splogs.
Blogger infrastructure is being overloaded, by the spammers creating and linking thousands of s…

Right now, as Blogger Support fixes the ongoing external publishing problems, and the photo upload problems, there is a third problem surfacing. Blog Hijacks.

It appears that there are several issues for us to consider.

Abandoned (deleted) blogs, by willful action of the owner, or by Blogger anti-splog efforts.
Switched to external publishing or a different URL, without planning completely.
Security (or lack of security) on our computers.
Unintentional hijackings, caused by collisions in blog name choice.


Here are a few of the problems reported, in the forums recently. Probably a lot of folks suffering don't know that they are not alone. I know there are others, that I haven't had the time to list here. And there are doubtless others, folks who don't know about the forums.

We need more analysis, and Blogger Support is not helping us. If you know anything about this problem, and have not reported what you know, you are part of the problem.

Of the 3 categories above, which one …