Why I stopped using Blogger

I first joined Blogger back in 2004. I didn’t start blogging in earnest until last year. The nice thing about Blogger is that it’s free. Unfortunately, the bad thing about Blogger is that it’s free.

That may seem to be a contradiction, but it’s true. Blogger is free and there are a lot of great tools that they give you. This also attracts a lot of people who attempt to use Blogger as a spamming tool. Blogger is a huge operation and they use automated tools to try and stop the spammers.

While using Blogger, I was a frequent reader of their help forums. I learned  a lot just by reading the questions and answers that were being given. It was there that I found out that I was not alone with not being able to search my blog posts. This problem has gone unsolved by Google since last July. This was my first reason for not using Blogger any more.

Over time, I saw an increase in people complaining about there blogs being deleted as spam blogs. I started looking at the cached version of their blogs on Google search.

I found that in a lot of cases, the blogs being deleted did not appear to be spam blogs. Of course, a lot of them appeared to be just that, spam blogs.

This made me institute frequent blog back ups as I could see there was an increase of ordinary blogs being targeted by the automated tools. Eventually, the lack of action on the blog search lead me to move my blogs to a web host and use WordPress. I left the old blogs behind at Blogger, with one post pointing to the new location. Here is the second reason I stopped using Blogger:

This is what I got in email on 3/28/10:

Hello,

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

For more information, please review the following resources:

Blogger Terms of Service: http://blogger.com/terms.g
Blogger Content Policy: http://blogger.com/content.g

-The Blogger Team

Keep in mind, there is only the one post pointing to stanmocek.com. So, I go to the help forums, and do the 4 step process to have it undeleted, and this is what I get in email last night:

Your blog at http://smocek.blogspot.com/ has been reviewed and confirmed as in violation of our Terms of Service for: NONE. In accordance to these terms, we’ve removed the blog and the URL is no longer accessible.

Even though my violation of Terms of Service is NONE, the blog is deleted. I’ve asked in the help forums for another review, but I’m not too hopeful.  I doubt that I will be going back to Blogger.

They’ve become too big, and the tools they are using are too feeble and inaccurate. Be forewarned, if you continue to use Blogger, make sure you back up your content frequently.

Update:

Looks like the second request for review cleared the hurdle and the the blog has been restored! Maybe there is hope yet. I still think they need to get better controls in place, and maybe even go to a two tier system, one free and one paid, with better support.