Tag: Blogger

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Are e-Commerce Blogs Considered Spam Blogs by Blogger?

Blogger has a new protocol, if they think that your blog is spam, they lock it. That’s right, lock it.

We have an e-commerce client who happens to sell new issue stamps and we blog three days a week for him about interesting stamps, stamp trivia, stories about stamps, and cool information that you might not know about particular stamps. Blogger has decided that the blog is a “spam blog” as all links point to his website (to products) as do many e-commerce blogs.

As a result, Blogger has threatened to delete the blog if we do not request a review. It has now been two weeks since we requested a review. In fact actually the second time we requested a review as Blogger forgot after one week that we had already requested a review once. There is no time frame on the review, just the threat to delete the blog.

Additionally now to publish a post on the blog, we have to enter a series of letter or numbers into a field, proving that we are real humans not robots posting to this blog. I have to say that this is annoying but to the nth degree. All of our content is unique and not scraped. If there was ever a good reason to move to WordPress, this is it.

I understand that no one wants to read spam, but I feel that Blogger is being heavy handed here. They should have instituted a timely review process before they slapped down interesting content rich blogs!

In fact you can check the blog out to review it for yourself here at The Stamp Collectors Corner.

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Are Blogger and Google Locking Down Your Blog?

This is a very good reason to be using WordPress, Blogger and Google have just started to lock down Blogger.com blogs. Here’s the situation… We’ve been blogging for an e-commerce store for more than three years. Posts are newsy and then usually point back to his website where people can buy the product we blog about.

Just this past week, Blogger/Google locked the blog. They called it a “spam blog”. Their criteria was that as all links pointed to one website, it was most likely a spam blog – NOT! We have had to request a personal review of our blog and our blog is locked for publishing until this review is performed. There is no information on how long the review will take and when this will happen.

Now the notes from Blogger/Google were nice, but the blog is locked down until Blogger/Google decides to turn us back on again. This is a great reason to be using WordPress on your own server. You will never be locked down, shut out, or unable to post to your blog when you control your own platform. Or for that matter explain that your blog is not a spam blog.

There are some good reasons why you would want to use www.Blogger.com for your blog platform.  However if you choose Blogger when you have a viable WordPress alternative, you may be letting Blogger and Google dictate what you can post and where you can link.

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Don’t Use Blogger Custom FTP

We used to implement Blogger custom FTP for clients, but now are no longer recommending its use. Blogger custom FTP is where your blogger account is set up to allow your blog posts to be archived back on your own domain server using FTP for search engine benefits.

The problem with Blogger custom FTP is that it is easily crashed, sometimes can take hours for the FTP part to send the posts to your server, and if you have a custom template can be fraught with problems.

If you want the search engine benefits that a blog affords, I strongly recommend that you use WordPress back on your own server. Upload and posting time is very snappy and you won’t end up at the mercy of Blogger when they do updates. We migrated several customers several months ago when Blogger had a reported bug for custom FTP clients as it took two days to publish blogs.

Another issue with Blogger custom FTP is label bloat. If you end of with many labels on your blog, get ready to spend hours deleting them as your publishing time will move to hours from seconds. The best option if you simply cannot use WordPress is to use Blogspot with a custom domain setting. We have found out that you really do not take a hit with the search engines when you are not using custom FTP blogging.