The Real Blogger Status

We've recently seen a few blog owners, in Blogger Help Forum: Get Help with an Issue , report their blogs being classified for phishing. Today my blog was locked due to "phishing": Hello, Your blog at http://xxxxxxx.blogspot.com/ has been reviewed and confirmed as in violation of our Terms of Service for: PHISHING. In accordance to these terms, we've removed the blog and the URL is no longer accessible. No, there was no phishing in this blog - and no, I didn't change or add anything to it recently, that could trigger a false detection or report.

We see an occasional hopeful spammer asking, in Blogger Help Forum: Get Help with an Issue , about one more spam blog subject. Can I publish a blog, and provide job postings? The would be blog owner has not read the AdSense advice or the Blogger Content rules , about copied content. A jobs website should be published by a Commercial or Government Employment ("Human Resources") agency - and very few commercial or government job agencies operate Blogger blogs, as their website.

Anxious blog owners ask the question periodically, in Blogger Help Forum: Get Help with an Issue . Is affiliate marketing allowed, in Blogger? And the truth is that there is no prohibition against affiliate marketing, by name. If the blog content is legal, you can do anything. The question is, can you make a Blogger blog, and use affiliate marketing, and not run afoul of Spam and TOS guidelines?

We've been exploring bogus redirection of reader traffic , for a few years. Similar to dubious awards and web rings , we have "traffic exchanges". Traffic exchanges are similar to "affiliate marketing", where readers of one blog are randomly shuffled to another blog , then to another - all the while, lighting up ads on each blog.

Recently, Google publicised advice about a new type of abuse that may be reportable, when present in a Blogger blog. Our philosophy has always been that Search should reflect the whole web. But revenge porn images are intensely personal and emotionally damaging, and serve only to degrade the victims—predominantly women. So going forward, we’ll honor requests from people to remove nude or sexually explicit images shared without their consent from Google Search results. This is a narrow and limited policy, similar to how we treat removal requests for other highly sensitive personal information, such as bank account numbers and signatures, that may surface in our search results. Supposedly, "revenge porn" mitigation is limited to removal from Google Search. In one forum discussion , however, the new classification appears to have successfully resulted in an offensive blog being removed from Blogger.

Some spammers do not appreciate the subtle details of the Blogger anti-spam policies . Spam: Spam takes several forms in Blogger, all of which can result in deletion of your account or blog. Some examples include creating blogs designed to drive traffic to your site or to move it up in search listings, posting comments on other people's blogs just to promote your site or product, and scraping existing content from other sources for the primary purpose of generating revenue or other personal gains.

We've had some photo / video blogs under review recently, and confirmed as TOS Violations. The citations were first seen late last year, and associated with the "Jennifer Lawrence" / "Anna Kendrick" celebrity leak photos scandal . We're asking Blogger Support for details of the policy - but right now it appears that Google is now forbidding any "nude celebrity" photos or videos, after their public relations problems surrounding the Jennifer Lawrence photos.

Recently, we've had a few unsatisfied blog owners, with blogs deleted for TOS violation. When able to research cached content, we see various posts with large, mysterious spreadsheets - and flashy ads with affiliate links. When we look closer at the content, we see the spreadsheets appear to provide betting odds - and the ads link to various online betting services. The blogs in question are providing gambling services or bookmaking. Some blog owners prefer to call this "sports betting".

Blogger blogs are starting to become a regular website publishing platform - not just a blogging platform. Long ago, a Blogger blog was just an online journal, with posts, and text. Then, Blogger added labels , later static pages - and then the ability to replace the home / main page , with dynamic or static content of your choice. Recently, the original limitation of 20 static pages / blog was relaxed (we are not yet certain that the limit has been eliminated completely, however). Now, you can practically publish a static website, without even having posts, using a Blogger platform. But, is this a good idea, with Blogger "One button" Publishing?

One of the most easily overlooked details, about Blogger blog content , is that GPT / PTC / PTS Content is not suitable, for Blogger blogs. Blogger Content Policy has a section which describes GPT / PTC / PTS Content, in passing . Spam: Spam takes several forms in Blogger, all of which can result in deletion of your account or blog. Some examples include creating blogs designed to drive traffic to your site or to move it up in search listings, posting comments on other people's blogs just to promote your site or product, and scraping existing content from other sources for the primary purpose of generating revenue or other personal gains. Unfortunately, spammers have been imaginatively subtle, in their description of various make money fast programmes - and not so many blog owners think it necessary to contact a lawyer, to interpret the Content Policy document, when planning their new blog.

I've been studying spam, in Blogger blogs, for over 5 years . This year, we've seen improvement in the automated spam classification process, implied by a noticeable reduction in spam review requests overall - and in a reduction of false positive classifications . During the past few months, blogs requested for review are 2 or 3 times more likely to be confirmed as legitimate spam blogs (true positives), compared to this time last year.

We're seeing a few recent reports, in Blogger Help Forum: Something Is Broken , from owners of empty and / or new blogs, about spurious spam classification. Very few owners of empty or new Blogger blogs understand why their blogs should be classified as possible spam hosts, by the Blogger anti-spam processes. Most blog owners seem to think that only blog content is considered, in spam classification.