I'm really not surprised by this. Lashing out when losing control over a situation is very common. Blogger is out of control. My advice to everyone is this: Don't do anything that could possibly be interpreted as an seo tactic.
Blogger have been cracking down hard on anything they consider a Splog. It's my understanding of the general situation that blogs which are heavily interlinked or that are used to link to websites in an attempt to boost their search engine placements will be targeted. (Please note, I'm making no judgements about blogs that have been deleted) I found these two articles which give a perspective: http://www.sifry.com/alerts/archives/000335.html http://thefreehold.blogspot.com/2005/12/freakin-blogger.html and this from Blogger: http://help.blogger.com/bin/answer.py?answer=1260#whatsasplog
I've been telling people to stay away from blogger since day one: http://www.subnixus.com/2005/11/08/stop-using-bloggercom
I don't see why, its a great service, if you use it on your own host and keep a genuine blog you've nothing to worry about. No back end to worry about, no install and no patches, updates etc. You can customize it to fit in with your current sites and it has all the powerful community features included. It's far more accessible to your average web user, doesn't need geek knowledge and is free to everyone. Why is that a bad thing? Why do you think Google owns it? Other pluses - nice flat HTML pages, easy SEOing, easy naviagation - what's the problem with that? A lot of your argument just sounds snobby to me.
Just trying to get everyone's thoughts. My blogs were hosted on xxx.blogspot.com (some now deleted). Since I have backups of all my posts, if I were to start a new blog xxx.com, do you think I will suffer from some sort of duplicate content penalty until all of the cached pages from the old site are removed from the search engines?
Can someone post the html code to redirect the blogspot blogs to the new urls so that the urls from the old pages get to the new ones with the same content? Thanks
Here it is <meta HTTP-EQUIV="REFRESH" content="0; url= <a href="http://bradsblog.net/" target="_blank">http://bradsblog.net/</a>">
Well, the only reason I started a blog on blogger was to get good related backlinks to my sites. But, they don't know that and I posted good useful unique content. No where could it have been considered spam. Nothing was excessive.
And the php version - permanent. <?php // Permanent redirection header("HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently"); header("Location: http://www.yournewsite.com/"); exit(); ?>
It might sound snobby (I'm talking about the generic blogger hosting), but I don't wake up in the morning and worry about my site not being there. I've seen far to many people have their blogs disabled on blogger... Just look at the first post of this thread.
Well no, having it not there is all of our nightmares, but that could happen with our own servers as well. The point is I think blogger is fine for your average web user with no experience, blogging about the family - but a lot of people here walk a fine line between true blogs and content for SEO and selling purposes - which can appear very Sbloggy.