Your Blog Hosted at Blogger.com Has Been Deleted

On February 15, 2010 I got an email from Google.com as the owner of blogger.com that one of my blog hosted at blogger.com has been deleted for, according to the email, violation of TOS (terms of services). The email said:

Email sender: Blogger
Hello,

Your blog at [website.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.

For more information, please review the following resources:

Blogger Terms of Service: http://blogger.com/terms.g
Blogger Content Policy: http://blogger.com/content.g

-The Blogger Team

I then logged in to my blogger.com admin, and request for restoration of the blog (by clicking the “Restore” button).

Today (two days later), I got another email stating that the blog in question was NOT in violation of Blogger TOS. Meaning, the Blogger Team has WRONGLY deleted my blog. So, the blog is back. Here’s the second email:

Hello,

Your blog at has been reviewed and confirmed as in violation of our Terms of Service for: NONE. In accordance to these terms, we’ve removed the blog and the URL is no longer accessible.

For more information, please review the following resources:

Blogger Terms of Service: http://blogger.com/terms.g
Blogger Content Policy: http://blogger.com/content.g

-The Blogger Team

This is not the first time that blogger.com has wrongly disabled/ deleted some blogs I created for alleged spam which has NEVER been true. The most shocking was when it deleted my favorite afsyuhud.blogspot.com which had Google PR 6 back then and because of which I moved to fatihsyuhud.com untill now.

Blogger.com seems never want to improve its spam detection tools. So many victims of Blogger outdated anti-spam-machine which make them move forever to another free blogging platform like WordPress.com or go to a paid hosted blog. If I may advise the Blogger team, they should turn off the anti-spam detection tools and check the suspicious blogs manually so that this kind of unnecessary case no longer happen in the future. This really create a very bad image to blogger.com.

I am sure, if blogger.com still stick to this kind of policy i.e. punishing a blog simply based on automatic anti-spam report, blogger.com will be left out by so many of its users.

Act before it comes too late, Blogger.com!

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Lessons learnt for newbie bloggers are these:

1. If you are interested in personal blogging / writing without any interest in making money online, create a blog in a free blog like wordpress.com.

2. If you want both expressing your free speech and making money online at the same time, create a blog in a self-hosted wordpress blog.

3. If you want to make a niche blog, ie a blog with specific content, for making money, run the blog in a self-hosted wordpress blog as well.

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There is a recent case in which a popular music blog has been mistakenly deleted too by Blogger.com team. This is from Blogger Team official blog (emphasis is mine):

We looked into this issue further and identified one case where a blogger did not receive notification of any DMCA complaints before their blog was removed. We’re sorry about this.

We’ve contacted the blog owner and restored their blog, effective immediately, and we fixed the bug that caused the termination without prior notification. We’re also looking into additional preventative protections. We know the DMCA process can be difficult to navigate, and we’re working on ways to make this process as smooth as possible.