A couple of years ago I needed to open a Google account so that I could reply to some Blogspot blogs in the comments section. So I did. This created the possibility for a blog so I created one of those as well. A couple of reasons. One was to try different blog engines – I have several on several different sites. And one was to post the occasional post that I didn’t want to post elsewhere and also to cross post from my other blogs. I toy with the idea of consolidating some where not specifically work related and this seemed like a good place to save some of my better posts.
Well two days ago I was trying to post there and got a message that my blog was disabled. What? I was confused and annoyed but filled out the form requesting assistance. This blog has been around for a couple of years, usage hasn’t changed so I saw no reason to seriously think that it could have been tagged as spam. Something else must have happened.
Finally, 48 hours or so later, I got a reply from Google saying that the problem I described was resolved. Yeah! So I try to open my blog and get "The blog you were looking for was not found." Doesn’t sound resolved to me. But I can get to my profile which I had not been able to get to before.
Google says the blog was marked as spam by a robot and to fill out a request to get it back. Several steps later (enter a phone number so I can get a text message, enter the code in another form and pass a captcha) that is done and they say "We have received your request for a review to verify that your blog is not a spam blog. Someone will look over your blog and respond "
I’m sort of used to email from help desks that like this one clearly are not responding to the problem I am asking about. They usually show some the entry I made or refer to the problem they think they fixed so you can see right away if they understood your issue or not. So this was well below my already low expectations. I mean once 24 hours passed without a response expectations dropped very low.
What I don’t understand is the lack of notice to me. I use my Google account for several things. For example Feedburner (which I was using long before Google bought them) and I have played with Analytics. So they have good reason to believe that the email address is a good one. It would not take a very smart robot to send an email with the process for getting a human review. With a tiny bit of effort they could explain what set off the robot to its conclusion.
And why didn’t the robot notice that I regularly delete spam comments? Do span blogs do that? I doubt it!
Well now I await the next reply from Google. Am I optimistic? Not really. A low level of expectation has been set. This time next week I will be at Google HQ. If it is not resolved by then maybe I’ll ask someone about it.
The blog seems to be back. No email letting me know though. Weird.