A new blogging services client asked me to help get her blog set up on Google Blogger (blogspot) a few months ago. I was happy to help.

This particular blog’s purpose was to provide useful information and legal tips on personal finance and debt management. The client wanted to monetize the blog through some affiliate programs and with AdSense.

I had no problem getting the content in place and laying out the pages, etc. I’ve used Blogger quite a bit so it didn’t take much time. A few weeks later, I went into Blogger to edit this personal finance blog. To my surprise, Google had disabled the blog completely as they believed it was spam. WTF??????

Now, it’s about 6 weeks later. Today, for the THIRD time I clicked the link to get the blog restored within Blogger because it was mis-characterized as spam. Meanwhile, the blog is not live, is not available to the public or EVEN TO THE BLOG ADMINISTRATOR, so even if I decided to try making some adjustments so the Goog wouldn’t consider it spam in the future, I CAN’T. In essence, then, Google Blogger has hijacked this content since it is no longer accessible. And meanwhile, of course, I see spam blogs all over the blogspot domain all the time. URGHH!!

Of course, all of this points out that if you want to have a blog, you are best off hosting it on your own domain so this doesn’t happen to you. And yes, there are countless other benefits to hosting your blog on your own domain, but that’s a post (or several) for another time.