As many of you know, another site of mine is The Generator Blog. Some time ago, when I wanted to post something, I got a message telling me that a spam prevention robot from Google thinks the blog looks like a spamblog. Which it absolutely is not!
Usually when this is the case, there will be a grace period of some days during which I can request that it be reviewed and recovered. So I did request a review. After a week nothing had happened and instead I got another message telling me it's a spamblog. Again I requested a review. At the same time I send a message to Blogger Help. I heard nothing.
Yesterday, for the third time, I got another message telling me it's a spamblog. Again I requested a review. This has been going on for 3 weeks now and there is no response from either Google or Blogger.
The Generator Blog has 2,500 visitors each day and in its 3 years of existance has welcomed over 2,500.000 guests. Now, visitor numbers are dropping by the hundreds a day and it seems there's nothing I can do about it. Any suggestions are welcome.
13 comment(s):
This happened to me too I ended up sending 3 emails to google I think. swearing I wasnt a robot.
Man, that sucks. They really need to do human site reviews instead of trusting algorithms that just look for certain word patterns. I'm betting that they're having a problem with the number of times that the same word "Generator" appears on the page. It make the think you're trying to spam them with a bunch of the same words. How stupid.
It's probably being flagged because it uses the word "generator" so much, and in that respect looks like a spam blog trying to increase its page rank. If you can't get a human to fix the problem, try cutting out "generator" from most of the headers and link text.
Welcone to the Club!
You are not alone; the same thing happened to many others.
My Blog http://lotharf.blogspot.com/ was blocked, too.
There was no reaction from Google on my e-mails. It took 3 weeks until it was unlocked.
In the meantime I moved my blog to *Wordpress*. I was able to move all my Posts there, so nothing was lost. Wordpress now works really fine.
I noticed there was less and less content being posted on the "Generator Blog"....I'm glad I now know why.
Fewer pictures, more text. The entries are too brief, that's why you're getting nailed.
Same thing happened to me with Look At This last year but it was reviewed within 2-3 days and then I was back in with no problems.
Too many links not enough text was my problem, then again that's the nature of that site.
Hope you get it sorted soon.
Someone mentioned Wordpress in an earlier comment maybe you should check out it's free package as it is quite good and you can import posts from Blogger.
I discovered some time ago that having an excessive number of links in the sidebar tends to spring the "spam" flag. A couple of things that might work in your favour are removing the list of previous generators to a seperate page, and reducing your display to fifteen or so posts on the main page. This may not help with your current categorisation as a spam blog, but it should help to prevent it from happening again.
From what I see of blogger sites, many people make the mistake of having too many links on one page, and thus flagging themselves as spammers. As blogging seems to be somewhat more popular than breathing at the moment, I imagine it's gonna take the limited number of googlers a long time to check every one manually. Even assuming they've got a bunch of monkeys dedicated to the task and not stealing time from more productive activities, you can expect a long wait before you get a response.
Another consideration - do you use any bots or software devices to automate posting to your blog? Does your browser identify itself properly when you post? I don't know if Google check these things, but it would seem probable that they do.
Note to googlers, does the bot that flags blogs as spam not check their popularity? Does it not check the time taken to create a post? Does it not check the number of non-link-bearing comments on a blog? These things are key indicators of human activity.
I still love google, but they've gotten so big, they can't help but suck when it comes to stuff like this.
Oh, and having your comments displayed on the page rather than in a popup might help. It might make it look less automated to a human eye, anyway ;-)
Thanks everyone for the comments.
At the moment I'm not thinking about changing over to Wordpress but I may have to if this takes to long.
I've requested another review and I think I'll wait another week.
Gerard - first sorry about my bad english, this generator blog have too many "generator" words in the title, google "thinks" that you are just a spamblog. Bye and good luck!
Happened to me too.
I ended up sending three or four emails and, then, moving my stuff over to LiveJournal.
I loved the stuff that I could do with Blogger, but I was pretty damn hacked off by the whole spambot episode.
Hope you find a solution for your issue.
puff
emm.. attractive thread
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