Sidelined

I'm glad you found me. This is my new - hopefully only temporary - home on Blogger. What happened to "The Blög"?

On January, 2nd, I received an automated mail from the Blogger Team:

Your blog, at http://thebloeg.blogspot.com/, has been identified as a potential spam blog.
[...]
You will not be able to publish posts to your blog until we review your site and confirm that it is not a spam blog.
[...]
We will take a look at your blog and unlock it within four business days.

Well, that was two weeks ago, a little bit more than the promissed four business days. Needless to say, I don't consider my blog to be a spam blog. Ok, I frequently link to the same sites (mostly my own), and I don't mind increasing their page rank a little bit. But then again, both my Training Center Converter and my Earthquake Mashup get some traffic every day and have good ranks in appropriate Google searches.

But it is amazing, how quick Google can take you off the map: On January, 9th, the robots.txt of my blog was changed to

User-agent: *
Disallow: /search
Disallow: /

It seems, at the same time the pages were penalised in Google's index. The number of visitors to the blog was never very high, but the decrease starting that day is significant:


Only one of the remaining visits is the result of a Google search, which usually directed the majority of my accidental readers to my blog. And yes: as I am writing this, it's 8 PM on the 15th, and so far I had no visitors today. I don't consider this the best example of "do no evil".

The timing couldn't be worse. As few posts as I usually create per month, I am really in need of writing a few things in the near future. I don't know if I stick to Blogger, I am somewhat reluctant to stay here. I could install some blogging software on my own server, but which? As I am using Zope there already, I thought about COREBlog, and it looks not too bad, but I am very undetermined at the moment.

By the way: As "The Daily Show" was renamed to "A Daily Show" while the authors are on strike, I thought naming this evasive site "A Blög" quite appropriate...

Update: A few days after my original blog was unlocked, traffic was back to normal:

So I think I was really "taken off the digital map" for a few days. Really scary...