Blogger, And Home / Small Business Blog Clusters

One topic of frustration, occasionally seen in Blogger Help Forum: Get Help with an Issue, involves home based business blogs, that may be victims of their own success.

We are not spam - we are a network of blog owners, in select cities all over the country. I am tired of hearing the apologies, this needs to be resolved.

The blog owner is being quite polite, but insistent.

Blog clusters, whether developed by home / small business owners, or malicious spammers, create problems for all Blogger blog owners. Home / small business blogs are clearly not intentional spam - but their structure makes them easy to mistake for spam blog farms.

Blogger values the creation of blogs with original content. Replicating original content across multiple blogs however, violates the Blogger Spam policy.

Blogger Content: Spam provides a good definition of the Blogger Spam policy.

Spam: Spam takes several forms in Blogger, all of which can result in deletion of your account or blog. Some examples include creating blogs designed to drive traffic to your site or to move it up in search listings, posting comments on other people's blogs just to promote your site or product, and scraping existing content from other sources for the primary purpose of generating revenue or other personal gains.

The most recently observed home / small business blog cluster, which generated traffic in the Spam Review section of the forum, was a USA based coupon sharing club, that had expanded into other areas - such as dining, entertainment and local events.

We are MORE than a coupon group. Our network works with Disney, Nickelodeon, local restaurants, reviews and products and events locally.

Other blog clusters have involved an Australian blog franchise of electronic / tech products and services - and a California / Florida carpet / home cleaning business.

Home / small business blogs can be mistaken for spam blogs.

Each of these three examples appear to have started as home / small businesses, possibly with one blog - and grew exponentially, as franchises. And each of the examples present problems, with automated spam classification.

• Aggregation of blogs produces unfair advantage, over other small businesses using Blogger.
• Aggregation of blogs skews spam classification, by tweaking the heuristic spam filters.
• Aggregation of blogs makes detection of actual spam blog farms more difficult.

These three concerns produce side effects, in the Blogger spam mitigation program - and lead to periodic spurious spam classification of home / small business blog clusters.

As the size of the clusters increase, so does the chance of repeated classification.

• Blogger policy prevents whitelisting the blogs in the cluster.
• The more blogs in the cluster, the greater chance that one or more blogs will be classified, at any given time.
• The more blogs in the cluster, the longer it will take to review a blog, when classified.

Understand your role, in the spam classification / review process.

If you operate a home / small business, which involves blogs clustered on a geographic and / or product - service relationship - and your business is impeded by spurious spam classification, we'll work with you, and try to get your blogs reviewed.

Please, understand that your home / small business may be pushing the limits of the Blogger spam mitigation program. Try to minimise content which replicates through multiple blogs in the cluster - and content which is scraped from various commercial websites.

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Some owners / operators of home / small businesses, which use #Blogger as a backbone for their business, produce clusters of blogs, organised on a geographic / product / service basis. Rapid growth of the businesses may lead to blogs which share content too heavily - and may lead to repeated spurious spam classification.

Owners of the blogs should learn to expect occasional spam classification, and try to minimise blog features which lead to spam classification.

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Phishing Is A Form Of Identity Theft

We've recently seen a few blog owners, in Blogger Help Forum: Get Help with an Issue, report their blogs being classified for phishing.

Today my blog was locked due to "phishing":

Hello, Your blog at http://xxxxxxx.blogspot.com/ has been reviewed and confirmed as in violation of our Terms of Service for: PHISHING. In accordance to these terms, we've removed the blog and the URL is no longer accessible.

No, there was no phishing in this blog - and no, I didn't change or add anything to it recently, that could trigger a false detection or report.

In the past, phishing generally would involve gadgets used to gather online identity information - such as third party email collection.

Email collection, in Blogger blogs, is best done using FeedBurner.

Most properly designed Blogger blogs, though, use FeedBurner Email Distribution - and FeedBurner, being part of Google, is hopefully not susceptible to phishing involvement.

Considering phishing as a form of identity theft, one might see a connection between some blogs, and Blogger abuse classification.

Phishing is the attempt to acquire sensitive information such as usernames, passwords, and credit card details (and sometimes, indirectly, money), often for malicious reasons, by masquerading as a trustworthy entity in an electronic communication.

Some blog owners, in an effort to increase traffic, may be incautiously adopting identities of commercial products.

Mentioning commercial products, in user names, is a way to increase blog traffic.

When using social networking platforms, like FaceBook, Google+, and Twitter, a user name which includes a commercial identity may seem like a great way to get attention from the other members. The legal owners of the commercial product, however, may consider this to be a copyright violation, or identity theft.

Each of the terms "copyright violation", "identity theft", and "impersonation" may be included by Blogger abuse classification, or online reviewers, as PHISHING.

Google - and AdSense - may also have a problem with social networking identity.

It's also possible that Google wants to protect themselves - and is requiring the guilty blogs to be classified.

I do note that one of the blogs, recently reported in the forum, appears to have empty AdSense ads - on the same page with FaceBook and Google+ badges, that may impersonate a commercial product. The impersonation - intentional or not - may also violate AdSense prohibited content.

Google ads may not be displayed on websites with content protected by copyright law unless they have the necessary legal rights to display or direct traffic to that content.

Besides being careful to only include original content in the blog, one should also be careful to not infringe on commercial identities in other websites - such as social networking platforms.

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Some #Blogger blog owners, in an attempt to increase blog traffic - are advertising their blogs using social networking platforms like FaceBook, Google+, and Twitter - and are using the names of commercial products in their user names.

The user names include carefully added words which, to the blog owners, may seem to protect the blogs from complaints by owners of the commercial products. It's possible that Blogger does not see that way - and may be righteously classifying the blogs for copyright violation or identity theft, both of which might be considered phishing.

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Jobs Blogs Are Not Desired, In Blogger

We see an occasional hopeful spammer asking, in Blogger Help Forum: Get Help with an Issue, about one more spam blog subject.

Can I publish a blog, and provide job postings?

The would be blog owner has not read the Blogger Content rules.

Jobs blogs are a problem, in Blogger. A jobs website should be published by a Commercial or Government Employment ("Human Resources") agency - and very few commercial or government job agencies operate Blogger blogs, as their website.

Most commercial and government agencies operate their own domains, and websites - and are properly advertised by their domain URLs. Not as "jobsformycountry.blogspot.com".

The few such agencies, which settle for publishing to Blogger, will probably be too small to provide anything interesting.

A jobs blog will be a favourite of many publishers, with little work required.

A jobs blog would be a favourite, of a blog owner, because it requires little effort to publish. You simply bookmark all of the agencies offering jobs, surf to each one periodically, and copy then paste interesting possibilities, into various blog posts.

Google does not want such content. Blogger specifically prohibits it.

Spam blogs cause various problems, beyond simply wasting a few seconds of your time when you happen to come across one. They can clog up search engines, making it difficult to find real content on the subjects that interest you. They may scrape content from other sites on the web, using other people's writing to make it look as though they have useful information of their own. And if an automated system is creating spam posts at an extremely high rate, it can impact the speed and quality of the service for other, legitimate users.

Many blog owners try to make money, with jobs blogs. AdSense won't publish ads on a site with copied content.

Fact: We don’t allow sites with auto-generated or otherwise unoriginal content to participate in the AdSense program. This is to ensure that our users are benefiting from a unique online experience and that our advertisers are partnering with useful and relevant sites.

A jobs blog publisher will be seeing this - a lot.



A blog owner won't have job offerings of his own - anything offered will be copied.

A blog owner who does not represent a commercial or government agency will have no way to generate legitimate job postings. Any postings on a jobs blog will be scraped from an legitimate commercial or government agency website - and the blog will be righteously classified as spam.

And that will leave another forum post.

My blog is locked for SPAM, without any prior warning. This is my favourite blog - how can they do this to me?

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Jobs blogs are a favourite subject, for many #Blogger blog owners. They require little work - and are guaranteed to generate a lot of traffic, from the hopeful job seekers who have no idea that everything offered on the blog has been scraped from a legitimate commercial or government agency website.

They will receive little respect from the Blogger spam classifier, though. As with all scraped content, they will be righteously classified, and deleted.

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Is Affiliate Marketing Allowed, In Blogger?

Anxious blog owners ask the question periodically, in Blogger Help Forum: Get Help with an Issue.

Is affiliate marketing allowed, in Blogger?

And the truth is that there is no prohibition against affiliate marketing, by name.

If the blog content is legal, you can do anything. The question is, can you make a Blogger blog, and use affiliate marketing, and not run afoul of Spam and TOS guidelines?

A description of "affiliate marketing" - or maybe the problems involved - would be a good place to start.

Affiliate marketing networks consist of blogs and websites, linked through ads. The reader, who clicks on an ad in a blog, is redirected to another affiliate blog - randomly selected by the redirector.

Blogger blogs need informative and interesting content, to attract traffic.

A blog, to successfully host ads, needs its own unique content, that both

• Is interesting or informative, to your readers - and to the search engines.
• Is relevant to the nature of the products advertised.

Too many blogs that involve affiliate marketing depend upon the affiliate relationship to both provide traffic to, and reward for ads hosted on, the blog. That's where the problem starts.

Ads need to be relevant to subject of the posts - and to the readers.

When you have a network of affiliate blogs and websites, where the only thing common between the blogs and websites is the affiliate relationship, the problem becomes worse.

Blogs that host ads, that are not relevant to the content of the blog, or to the interests of the readers, are considered spam hosts.

As an example, AdSense is a contextual service. AdSense ads are chosen according to content of the posts.

Non contextual ads still need to be relevant to the post content - and this may not be the case, with affiliate ads.

Ads that link blogs with illegal content can also use affiliate techniques.

Some blogs with illegal content can also link to similar blogs. In this case, all blogs are detected, and deleted.

Bookmakers setup blogs which focus on various gambling activities, like sports betting.



Bookmaking is a popular blog topic - and bookmakers have been known to setup affiliate networks - which can be deleted when detected.

Network membership does not provide content - it links to content.

Affiliate marketing network membership, by itself, does not provide content - and blog readers are not cattle, to be shifted from blog to blog, randomly.

If a reader clicks on a link, he expects to be taken to another blog with relevant or similar content, with complementary information - not just complementary ads. Ads are not content - they are, at best, decorations.

Both Blogger Content - and Google Terms Of Service contain details.

If you publish a blog and intend to include affiliate networking, stay well within the limits, described in Content and TOS. If you cross the line, you may not get a warning, in time to save your blog.

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Some #Blogger blog owners join affiliate marketing networks, to both gain traffic and get paid for providing traffic. They do not care that their readers, clicking on an affiliate ad, may wind up on another blog or website with completely different content - but the same ads.

The affiliate network both compensates for the clicks by the readers, and transports the readers randomly, from blog to blog. To an affiliate redirector, one blog is as good as another - and this makes the affiliate links spam.

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Empty Or New Blogs Can Be Classified As Spam Hosts

We're seeing a few recent reports, in Blogger Help Forum: Something Is Broken, from owners of empty and / or new blogs, about spurious spam classification.

Very few owners of empty or new Blogger blogs understand why their blogs should be classified as possible spam hosts, by the Blogger anti-spam processes. Most blog owners seem to think that only blog content is considered, in spam classification.

Spam classification considers many characteristics of a Blogger blog, in classifying any blog as a possible spam host.

Blog post content is an obvious - but not the only - factor in spam classification. Given previously observed behaviour of spammers, many characteristics of blogs, besides simply the extracted and analysed content, are used in classifying possible spam blogs. Using fuzzy spam classification techniques, one might also consider

• Accessories and decorations, on the blog.
• Addresses used, in setting up multiple blogs.
• Overall behaviour in Google, by the owner.
• Past posting habits of the owner.
• Previous classification of similar blogs.

Some spammers obscure their activity, with gratuitous Google activity.

Some spammers are active in multiple Google activities and features. It's possible that some spammers even try to make their spam in Blogger harder to detect, by spreading their activity across other Google services - even when non abusive in other Google services.

Some spammers may not realise that activity in other Google areas can be tracked, and included by Blogger spam classifications processes.

Blog publishers, enjoying similar activities, may be spuriously classified.

Blog owners who use one or more techniques involved in setting up and maintaining spam blog farms may be classified as spammers - and their blogs then classified as possible spam hosts.

The term "blog owner" must itself be considered fuzzily, as some spam blog farms contain blogs owned by multiple Blogger accounts and profiles. Some Blogger accounts, similar to known spammer accounts - even with no blogs owned, or with empty blogs published - may then appear as possible spam hosts.

Empty blogs may still provide clues, which suggest spammy purpose.

Empty blogs, that appear similar to blogs in known spam farms, may themselves be classified as possible spam hosts. Various details such as blog name, blog design, and use of various blog accessories and features, can make a blog appear similar to known spam blogs - with no other content.

As long as spammers exist, some Blogger blogs will be spuriously classified.

Given the need for Google to reduce the volume of spam blogs, fuzzy spam classification might use any of the above details, in classifying any empty or new blog as a possible spam blog. This will, unfortunately, lead to spurious spam blog detection.

The possibility of spurious classification cannot prevent classification, in general.

Given the ability of spammers to publish multiple blogs in the Blogger name space, classifying empty and new blogs is necessary, in making it possible for Google to keep up with spammy activity. This technique enables publishers of genuine blogs to have their blogs viewed as righteous Internet content - not as one more blog, in a sea of spam.

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