Blogger Flagged My Blog as a Spam Blog

Categories: Blogger, Spam

It's no secret that spam blogs are running rampant. In fact, the Search Engine Journal estimates that 60% of Google’s Blogger Blogs are spam blogs, so I can understand why they're cracking down on them.

So today, the fourth of July, I decided to add a blog post that will act as a link page. The page was created with the intention of linking to a small number of related blogs and sites that I feel are pertinent, and to be the only blog post dedicated to that.

Upon posting that blog entry I was asked for Word Verification. Clicking the help question mark displayed this explaination:

Blogger's spam-prevention robots have detected that your blog has characteristics of a spam blog. (What's a spam blog?) Since you're an actual person reading this, your blog is probably not a spam blog. Automated spam detection is inherently fuzzy, and we sincerely apologize for this false positive.

and they gave me the opportunity to have a staff member of Blogger come and review the content of my blog to turn off the spam filtering.

Now even though the word verification is a pain in the ass, I applaud Blogger for doing this. I'm personally so sick of browsing through blogs that are full of meaningless keyword spams and affiliate links without content. If that means losing a few posts due to mistyping the word verification than I can live with that. What I'd like to see is more people clicking the Flag as Objectional button on the Blogger toolbar, whenever they come across spam blogs. Blogger is a community, and as such, it is not only the Blogger staff that is responsible for removing spam blogs, but also the community itself if it wants to continue to grow and thrive. If you're interested in preventing spam blogs, check out the Spam Chongqing blog. It has a lot of good information.

I will update this post with the length of time it takes Blogger to unlist me as a potential spam blog. Until then, happy 4th of July!

UPDATE: It only took them until July 7th to unflag my blog. No harm, no foul.