On being misidentified as a splog

It's not everyday Google accuses you of being a spammer but that's exactly what happened yesterday when Blogger sent me the below email alerting me that this blog had been "identified as a potential spam blog" and blocking me from posting until they had reviewed the site.



Mercifully, they were quicker than the promised four business days in reinstating my access, although I'm still none the wiser as to why it was singled out in the first place. Maybe my writing naturally displays the hallmarks of "irrelevant, repetitive, or nonsensical text" ;-)

A (hopefully) more plausible theory is that I'm suffering as result of actual spam blogs scraping this site and reproducing my copy. A friend had alerted me to this back in November after he chanced upon a duplicate of a post I'd written, but I wasn't sure what (if anything) I could usefully do about it (here's the original and here's the splog: http://inn4g.handigu.com/Mogopop (you'll have to cut-and-paste it as I don't want to give the bastards any Googlejuice).

Whilst I applaud Google's (arguably belated) moves to crack down on spam blogs hosted on blogspot domains, I can't help wondering whether giving bloggers an opportunity to validate the legitimacy of their blogs before blocking them from posting might be a smart move.