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Blogs And The Redirect Warning

The Blogosphere, and particularly the BlogSpot address space, has been known, for some time, as a space where dodgy content is located.

BlogSpot has been used for delivery of visually undesirable content (aka porn), and non visually undesirable content (aka hacking and spam) for some time. In January 2008, that changed, and publishers of blogs containing various forms of hacking / porn / spam found their activities hampered (though not completely shut down).

Many bloggers who wished to continue to provide us with antisocial and illegal content, using Google servers, started to relocate their payload, so Blogger could not detect the malicious blogs by merely scanning all of BlogSpot.

Similar to the Content Warning interstitial advice, Blogger added a redirected blog interstitial advice, indicating that the blog reader had just clicked on a link leading away from BlogSpot.


If Blogger can't locate the blog on their servers, your readers will see a righteous warning - and your blog could be classified as a malware or spam host.
When your blog is published to an external URL, the BlogSpot URL is redirected to the external URL. This keeps your readers, still using the BlogSpot URL, able to read your blog.

The bad guys can, just as easily, locate their malicious content in a non BlogSpot server, which can't be detected by the Blogger anti hacking porn spam scanning. If your blog redirects to other than a properly configured external domain, your readers should get this unwelcome advice.

Unfortunately, this interstitial warning, like the Content Warning interstitial advice, will interfere with various automated and manual surfing activity. If you don't want your readers seeing this, you use a properly configured externally published blog.

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