The Real Blogger Status

I've been writing about spam , and about Blogger blogs, for many years. In 2006, I started attacking spam in Blogger Help Forum . As I use this blog, to attack spammers, I have taken a few hits from spammers - including one from the referer spam producers , in 2011. Besides the hits from spammers, I get an occasional unhappy non spammer, confusing my occasional remarks about spam , with evidence of my general lack of civility towards non spammers, falsely accused of spamming. And some non spammers seem to see this blog as a forum where they may air their gripes about Blogger, and about the Blogger spam classification policy in general.

As Blogger in general, and custom domain publishing in particular, becomes more popular in Asia and Africa, we are seeing more problems with the Blogger / Google domain purchase process. The basic problem, in Blogger Help Forum: Something Is Broken , will be expressed so simply. My blog is showing an off-site redirect. You're about to be redirected. The blog that used to be here is now at http://www.mydomain.com. Do you wish to be redirected? What do I do now? Some time ago, this report would have been diagnosed as spurious DNS addresses - and we would point out the necessities of proper custom domain DNS addressing , when setting up the domain yourself. Nowadays, an increasingly common diagnosis, for this problem, is an unsuccessfully purchased domain , using the Blogger / Google "Buy a domain" or Google Apps purchase process.

As the frustrations about the CC TLD aliases continue to be reported in Blogger Help Forum: Something Is Broken , and some of the details are discovered and resolved, we are seeing suggestions of other, more subtle problems. Some blog owners claim that their page rank / search engine reputation has taken a nose dive, because their readership is spread out over many different countries. Apparently, canonical resolution by the search engines does not work, for all "blogspot.com" published blogs. Older blogs, including those with Classic (HTML based) templates - and possibly some older Layout templates - seem to lack canonical resolution.

We have a number of blog owners, apparently located in Canada, who have been sharing their "blogspot.com" published Blogger blogs, using the "blogspot.ca" alias. This week, two major services - FaceBook and McAfee Anti-Malware, have decided that links mentioning "blogspot.ca" are not trustworthy. Use of the Country Code aliases - of which "blogspot.ca" is simply one of many - has provided potential for confusion, for some time. What some blog owners may not realise is that only the online viewers of the blog (and the owners, viewing their own blogs) see the "blogspot.ca" alias - and only when they are located in Canada. At the same time, people in Malaysia see their blog (and other blogs, published to "blogspot.com") as "blogspot.my", people in Mexico see their blog as "blogspot.mx", etc.

We've been exploring the nature of referer spam for over a year now. I've provided various suggestions about the problem - what you should not do , the observation that it does not actually show traffic to your blog, and even why Stats is vulnerable to this abuse. To the most frequently asked question What do I do about it? the answer is generally Don't click on the links. And that's just half of the answer, if we think about it.

Occasionally in Blogger Help Forum: Something Is Broken , we see a query from a confused blog owner. I made a large number of posts today, and Blogger is now requiring me to solve a CAPTCHA, for every post. I tried to find the form to submit, so that my website could be reviewed, but I could not find it. What do I do, now? This blog owner, like too many, does not understand the spam mitigation policy.

Every person who maintains a Blogger blog (or other web site) has his or her own idea about what features she or he wants to present, on his or her blog / web site. With a Classic template, this need was provided only by editing the blog template, using HTML. With a Layouts / Designer template, besides letting us add and move template objects all over the display page, Blogger gives us the ability to add and move objects all over the post layout. This, too, is done without even opening the "Edit HTML" Template wizard.