Internet Newbies Blog - Beware

About the Author

Margaret Dunn

Hello everyone! I am a Headhunter/website builder/and aspiring internet marketer. "Headhunting" is what I've been doing for the past 20+ years. (Visit Job Search 101) I've been a website builder/internet markete

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To all of you "internet newbies" here is my "internet newbies blog" entry. If you are trying to decide where you want to start a blog, you should check out a variety of blog hosting sites. Here's why.

I am a very disgruntled "internet newbie blogger". It took me six months to build 12 blogs on blogspot.com. It took one minute for blogger to wipe out all 12 blogs.

I had built wonderful blogs related to all different types of issues. My favorite was my "for grandmas only" blog which now leads to a 404 redirect (the page doesn't exist). My business blog had over 28 entries and was just to the place that I wanted it. On Friday Oct 13th, blogger went down for about 2 hours. On Friday, Oct 12th, I had checked on all of my blogs and everything was working fine. On the day of Fri Oct 13th, my blogs went missing from my blogger dashboard. My dashboard (the place that shows the names of all of your blogs) was empty. I was still able to sign in and see my profile, but it said that I had no blogs.

Why? My blogs, all 12 of them, were flagged as being spam. No warning, no chance to change what was wrong (but there wasn't anything wrong), no second chance. My blogs indeed were not spam originally, but on Friday 13th, they became spam. Someone had hijacked 5/12 blog urls and were now sending my traffic to their new spam sites. Dig a bit deeper and you would find that some of the links that look innocent enough don't take you to where you think you are supposed to be going, ie. airline jobs takes you to an adult swingers site, etc..

I appealed over and over again to blogger. I was totally distressed. I appealed to the google webmaster, but they said it wasn't their issue. I reported the urls to the google webmaster as being spam urls! Even that didn't work. The hijackers had won. I did a WHOIS on these people and one was from Venezuela and the other from Germany.

Google and Blogger did nothing about it. Yet, they deleted 12 innocent blogs with no warning. I cried about it for about 2 weeks. I was sick to my stomach. I became enraged. It finally got to the point where I had to decide that nothing was going to be done, that the world wasn't fair, that blogger wasn't fair, that google keep telling me to write somewhere else about the problem yet there were no appropriate categories. No one wanted to take the blame.

So here I am, a lone, single internet newbie blogger trying to build blogs for fun and for business. I am out 12 blogs. What do I do? I don't rebuild on blogger for sure.

I went out and built some new blogs. I'd put the urls in here but I really am afraid to list them. Just beware if you are going to build on blogger. Something happened to their security that night (although they won't confess to that). You can go into the blogger groups and it would be a good idea to do that so you can see just how many issues blogger does have. They are switching over to blogger beta and the problems are endless. People's blogs are disappearing. Their comments are disappearing. It's much harder to use then the old blogger, but it's the newest "thing" for blogger.

Internet Newbies Blog will be built some day soon. I will come back and let you know because we all need to share our failures as well as our successes. On to blog building elsewhere for now.