What To Do When Your Blogspot Blog Got Deleted By Google

"Help! My blogger blog was deleted by google"

This is what happened to me some days ago. I was just signing in to my google account to see how my blogs were doing. I have all my blogs on blogspot, also known as blogger, which all belongs to google.

The first thing that seemed strange was that they asked me when logging in what my phone number was, and they said that some "unusual activity" had occured. It was weird but I verified with my phone that I was not a robot.

Then, suddenly, without any warning, I noticed that one of my blogs was totally missing from the dashboard. At first, I thought that the "unusual activity" must have been that my account had been hijacked by some hacker in another country and that someone must have had his fun removing my blog.

Only a couple of heart attack seconds later, I realised that my blog was under the "deleted blogs". I was still convinced it was a hacker's fault. But then I checked my gmail account (the second thing I do after checking my blogger account) and found an email.

The email informed me that my blog had been deleted by the blogger team (or google) because of a spam suspicion. The automated system had found my blog to be spammy and therefore totally deleted it over night.

I was shocked. I knew that you could be banned from the google search engine if your blog was spammy, or that you could be thrown out of adsense. But I never even imagined they would delete my blog.

At this point in time, my situation was as follows:

• I had written almost 100 posts that I now no longer could access
• My blog seemed to have been lost forever
• I had worked hours and hours over more than half a year to write all these unique posts
• I felt totally innocent (trying hard to make a good website for my visitors) although I knew that humans make mistakes, and maybe a sloppy little mistake with affiliate links could have cost me months of work.

I spent the next hours trying to do two things: Finding out how to reverse the process of my blog being deleted, and trying to recover my blog posts.

Recovering the blog posts proved to be difficult. I had never exported my blog onto my computer (big mistake) so none of my posts were available offline. I didn't even remember all my 94 posts that I  had written. Also, my blog was deleted, therefore offline, and I could not even access my blog in the dashboard.

The first thing I did was to check my blogger profile again for posts that I had subscribed for (I had subscribed to my own feed, meaning I could see posts that had been put online by myself). Then, I had to open each link to each article, notice that each of my posts is offline, copy the url into the google search engine, right-click the corresponding result (luckily the result still displayed each time), open in cache, save the content of those pages offline (the safest way is to copy everything into a word file), and do this over and over again with every article that matters to you (if you can remember what they were called or you know the exact urls).

Regarding the deletion of my blog: I sent an appeal to google. It's the only thing you can do. You are then supposed to wait for up to 48 hours for something to happen. Only THEN are you allowed to / supposed to consult the google help forums.

So I sent an appeal. It's basically only an electronic message where you confirm with a captcha phrase that you are a real person. No need to justify yourself or write any text.

Luckily, on an early Monday morning, less than 24 hours after it had been deleted, my blog was put back to life and I received an apology by email. My blog had wrongfully been detected as spam, but a human being checked out my website to come to the conclusion that my blog is, in fact, okay and not meant to be spammy.

As far as I can tell, the only negative side effects on my blog's performance were that it cost me a whole day of people visiting (I got over 100 page views instead of possibly a thousand) and my income on adsense and amazon was brought to a halt (consider that it was a Sunday and people like to go shopping on amazon on Sundays).

When my blog was undeleted, it performed well again.

Here is what I advise people to do:

First of all, your situation should be like this:

• You have a blogspot / blogger account where your blog was
• Your blog was deleted by the blogger team / google, not by you accidentally
• The reason for your blog being deleted has been explained to you in an email
• You feel innocent because you had no bad intentions and didn't violate any terms of service (TOS) on purpose

In this case, my advice to you is: Send the appeal so that someone can look over the problem. Don't go too crazy over the fact that your blog has disappeared. Also don't send the appeal twice, and don't start a topic on google forums yet. You can try to recover your articles so that at least your material as a writer can be saved. Because, if the blog stays deleted, it helps to at least have your written articles somewhere in an MS word file. Then you could publish them again on a different blog (wordpress with paid hosting for example). I know, this would suck because you would have to start over in search engine rankings, but believe me, at least your work would be online again.

Apart from that, remember that you might be lucky and your blog will be restored. Don't think too far ahead if you haven't even received news from google / blogger team.

Why your blog may have gotten deleted

Here is the supposed reason why my blog was deleted, and this could have happened to you:

In my case, I never had bad intentions, but I did use the amazon affiliate program. This meant that I had links on my articles that led to amazon. Google recognizes these links, and if you put a whole bunch of them into one article, google will think you are a spammer.

In most websites that are not blogspot, this will only lead to a search engine penalty (your website will go from first in the search results to 200th position). But in blogspot, this can lead to the deletion of your blog!

HOWEVER: I didn't put a crazy amount of links into one article. But you know what my mistake was? While I only used between one and three amazon links in each article, I did not use a "jump break" in every article. The jump break is the little tool you can use (looks like a torn piece of paper) in your blog post instruments. When you are writing a post, you can see it: It's 9 items away to the right when you look at the "bold" button (the one that looks like this: B)

The purpose of the jump break is to shorten your articles as they appear on the home page of your blog. Then it says "read more" instead of showing the whole article.

As I hadn't used this enough, there were several articles on the "home" section of my blog, some of them were full-length articles including one or two or even three amazon links. And now consider several articles containing amazon links!

In total, I had 5 amazon links on my "home" page displayed, together with 3 standard google adsense ads. Now you can imagine: 8 ad scripts on a single page... that looks a lot like spam!

Be sure that your articles are cut short and no affiliate links are displayed in the shortened version of an article. And don't use 5 affiliate links on a single article that also has adsense ads on it. This might backfire heavily!

So this is what happened when google deleted my blogger blog. When your blogspot blog got deleted by the blogger team, now you know what you have to do. If it still seems like your blog will be deleted for all times, use the cache trick (right clicking on search results for your article urls in google) to try and save your content in a word file. Good luck.

By the way: I think it's really unfair the google deletes those blogs. Even if they were spammy, at least give a warning first. Apart from that: What about the intellectual property of the innocent ones who write articles worth hours of work? At least you should "give back" the contents to the bloggers if they request their content back.

Also, being informed by email that "your blog has been deleted" is a big shocker. My insides were turning when I read it. I strongly believe that customer service in google and facebook have a lot of improvements ahead of them if they want to be customer-friendly.