LOL, that single blog has 12 backlinks pointing to it, so not much link building. We all own our websites no matter Blogger or Wordpress, you still don't own the hosting. Just becuase you paid $200 or so, doesn't mean squat. Your paid hosting could be shut down just as fast as a Blogger account If you don't follow the host TOS. So, you guys that don't need the extra $100 a month, If I took $100 a month from you, you wouldn't mind? You do realize I havn't touched that blog since 1/12/10, so you can see it's a lot of hard work [wink]. I'll bet my last penny, anyone that has been shut down by Blogger, was a spammer...
I'm not knocking what you are doing, I'm just saying it's a different level. And no, you don't own your blog if you are using a free service, they are allowing you to use it. And yes, by your same logic my hosting account could be strangely shut down (but not as likely as your blogger account being deactivated) but I could also have my home owners insurance canceled and my drivers licensed revoked, but not without provocation. I could also get hit by a truck crossing the street later on today, or have a meteor fall on my head. Calculate those odds. But I will tell you what is more possible for you, than for me..is that Google could shut down the whole blogger system, or make sweeping changes that affect your blog...or they could start charging a small monthly to cut out the riff raff...none of those things can happen to me, because I own my own blogs. No matter how you try and justify it..you are at their mercy, there just haven't been any inconveniences for you up until now. There is nothing wrong with the way you are doing it. I applaud you, but don't act like you are doing anything special or ground breaking just because you are so proud of not spending any money on your ""business" or that we are the fools because we want to make more than a lousy $100 a month or want more for our websites and blogs than what blogger can offer. I don't have one blog that could operate on blogger..it's too limited. That's me. Some people pray to the adsense God and are tickled pink to make $100 a month, others could care less about adsense and will spend $1k to make $7k. There are too many different levels of webmasters here for you to put anyone down and be so arrogant about a lousy $100 a month. You have your way and we have ours, and when you are ready to graduate to making some money that you can actually live on and buy something with, you will start to invest in yourself and your business just like the rest of us did. When you are ready to have a website that you can list as an asset with value, rather than just a worthless hobby account that you can claim no ownership to, you will invest in your business. You can only do so much for free, once you max that out, it's time to get serious about your business.
You have some good points. Most of my comments are based on the 1st post in this thread, the spammer. I know $100 isn't much, but it's better than $0. BTW I do have a single Wordpress blog/CMS site, it's also a (legit) file download site (new in 12/2009). Not much traffic to monetize yet. So, I realize that Blogger isn't going to keep food on the table, it started as a hobby. I've been phasing out blog/download post the last few months, just to see what would happen with Adsense, it's kinda of funny the Adsense is staying about the same as when I was balls to the wall posting. I started the Wordpress site really becuase I was getting bored with the niche blog on Blogger, & wanted to test the wordpress waters.
I think you will begin to like it once you put some time into it. I started out on free hosted stuff and once I made the switch I couldn't believe that I hadn't done it before and I have been hooked ever since. Yeah, it's learning experience, but worth it in the end. There is just so much more freedom and so many possibilities of the kind of sites that you can build. No one can tell you that you can't run a certain script or edit certain files...and if you are lucky enough to build something that people want to sponsor (Private advertising), even better. Things that wouldn't happen on Blogger, or Wordpress.com, or Typepad or any of them. If you can build a blogger blog up to $100 a month, then you should be able to do the same with self hosted WP, maybe even better. After that as they say, "Just rinse and repeat". By the way, you'd be surprised what kind of hosting you can get for under $100...if you have at least one site making that a month and you have 20-30 other sites at various stages...it IS all profit and you have good hosting to expand further.
I have more than 20 blogger blogs and One of them were deleted while ago. Reason they give is SPAM. Can't be the content because everything there was original. This is what TOS has, Only reason can be blog comments. I haven't done any SEO but I remember I did commented on several blogs. So this can be the only reason I can think of. Anyway I was taking backups after very post I had done. So all my content is safe. I'm going to import into a WP blog. So if you run Blogspot blogs make sure you take backups frequently. I like Blogspot but now you can't even SEO your blog without worrying.
Did the blogger blog that got deleted, have dofollow (comment) backlinks to the readers blogs? I changed all my comments, so that the person leaving a comment can't post a URL/link to their own blog/site. They can still add their URL while posting the comment, but the URL is never posted to my Blogger blog. Been like this for about 6-months & nobody has ever asked about it, so I'll leave it like I have it now (no URLs), & I still get the same amount of comments.
Also, I've been doing SEO on all my blogs, never had any problems. If your blog ever gets deleted, you can always go to Google search & get all your blogs content from the Google Cache, it should be good for a few days.
If you are serious about blogging, Better to stay away from blogger. yeah i too heard so many stories about the blog deletion with out any warning. people are spending their valuable time to write and publish their contents and blogger is just deleting it with out even a warning. Pathetic... You can go for wordpress. which is far better than blogger. else go for a domain and hosting space. that will definitely save your time and effort, and sometimes you can make some bucks too.