Google Blogger deleted my blog ... as Spam | Hacker News Reader

Google Blogger deleted my blog ... as Spam

Google Blogger team "surprised" me in a bad way today -- they claim that my purely hand-written blog with occasional posts on development topics -- is spam, so they deleted it: === Your blog at http://developmenttips.blogspot.com/ has been reviewed and confirmed as in violation of our Terms of Service for: SPAM. In accordance to these terms, we've removed the blog and the URL is no longer accessible. === My blog might be boring, but how could it qualify as SPAM -- it have no clue. Google Cache is still available -- http://www.google.com/search?hl=&q=site%3Adevelopmenttips.blogspot.com

Any idea what went wrong?

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At first thought, I too would think it was written by a machine, not a person... Frankly, I am not impressed with google's abilities to recognize spam. After all, sufficiently advanced spam is indistinguishable from content. And humans are slowly becoming machines.

1) I know that my writing skills are not too good, but I'm sure I'm doing much better than even modern machines. However spammers can easily read RSS from my blog and feed it into their blog. The end result -- spam content is identical to my blog... Still it does not excuse Blogger for doing such a bad job at spam detection. My account is much older (5+ years) than spammers' accounts.

It seems to have now been restored.

I imagine it was your resume that triggered it, particularly the Keywords section.

1) Yes, I submitted appeal request and now my blog is restored. But that made me think about how much I can trust blogger... Probably not too much. 2) Why do you think it was keywords section? Do you think spam filters don't like keywords and are able to recognize such section?

This will probably not be something you want to hear, but this is EXACTLY why you should host your own blog on your own server. No threat from someone potentially shutting it down for no reason.

I was hosting blogs on my own server in the past. But it takes additional effort to host it on my own server... May be I should...

It takes less effort to host your own blog than it does to recover from someone taking yours down and leaving you hangin out to dry.

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