Google wrongly labels Alphatrends.net and blocks author’s access.
Is your blog safe?
Alphatrends is the BlogSpot home for Brain Shannon’s financial videos.
His analysis of stock trading videos are some of the most subscribed financial videos on YouTube. He has over 600 videos and over 5000 YouTube subscribers. He posts a video on stock analysis daily at his blog. Here is an example:
Friday, I got a message through MyBlogLog that he was unable to update his blog because Google was blocking him as a spam blog.
My first reaction was "You’ve got to be kidding." One look at Brian’s videos will show you they are not spam. The is quality content. In fact, most of it is a bit over my head, but I want to learn about stocks and subscribe to his blog because, eventually, I’ll understand. His blog consists of his daily videos and an occasional post about something related.
Alphatrends is not a site you would think could be labeled as spam.
Brian has a PR from Google of 5. He has an Alexa rating of 159,700. This is a financial blog, not a blog that is going to attract lots of readers with an Alexa toolbar. In other words, Alphatrends has good links and decent traffic. I think it is from the content and not from Brian working hard promoting his blog.
Brian is back up on Alphatrends.
Usually, Google is quick to fix these situations. It still takes time. If your label as spam by Google, you get no warning. You are guilty until proven innocent. That can take a couple days. I noticed that while Brian was not able to update his blog, AdSense was still advertising. What happens if your AdSense account gets labeled as spam also? You would not be able to remove it from the blog as Google blocks your updates and still keeps the blog showing. You better hope they let you back in.
I think this is a good example of why any blogger should look into their own hosting.
Brian has a domain name already Alphatrends.net. All he would need is hosting and he would not have been cut off from his blog. With your own hosting, even with a bad host, you should at least have a warning before something like this would happen. In Brian’s case, I doubt if any host would have considered a complaint against him valid.
If you are using WordPress.com or Blogger/Blogspot you are adding an unnecessary risk with your business.
If you are looking into stock trading, Alphatrends is a blog you should look at.
Brian Shannon does not give investment advice. He teaches how to understand stocks and evaluate them technically.
For Alpahtrends.net maybe hosting might be a good investment at $10/month.
This seems like a no-brainer! With his YouTube following people will follow him wherever he goes.
It always amazes me the people who build up such great blogs and leave them on the free sites. I can understand starting out there, but people please, get your own site once it becomes popular (or profitable). Don’t leave your fate in someone else’s hands.
They did some tweaking to their spam detection ‘bot in April that flagged just about any blog that had Javascript or embeds in the blog entry text on multiple posts as a spam blog. I had a couple of my niche blogs marked like this too. I think they’ve made a correction now though.
Blogger gets gamed by blackhatters so much that they’ve gotten where they’ve got to go with the guilty until proven innocent approach. It’s too bad that things are that way.
@Frank Yep, in this case the blog was back up on Monday so I think he only missed a post or two on Friday. My point is if you are going to spend the time and resources on a site or blog, why take the chance of losing it or even losing some of your income?
@Tracy Like Frank said, a little tweak and it was labeled spam without any human looking at it.
Time of this post is not given..>! but is it something based on biased from google, since they started Google Finance with that includes stock information?
I will rate it very un-ethical and unprofessional from google. Ok they made many people’s life but ruining even without warning, and you even can’t go to court? Thats shame, because a social site with less than 100Ks in Alexa make sense but a finance site with around 150ks is an achievement.
One of my blog is hosted over blogger, which is now a nightmare to keep there, though hosted other 2 on my own.
Az- It was in April 2008. That is the problem with any free hosting option. It can be a problem even with paid hosting if you are not reasonably careful (and who can read the legal jargon anyways).
Thats true, i experienced stolen of even Hosting servers or hard drive failures with whole data lost.
by hosting at blogger i could not see any option (tried may be i missed) to take backup of all posts/data. If this happens to a paid hosting at least i can take backups to my local system or burn somewhere and if i will find downtime or unstable server i can immediately change the hosting with minimal drop of rankings on SEs.
Thanks!
These things happen from time to time with Google. It is constantly changing things to stay ahead of the spammers. But, they always tend to mess up in high profile ways. like deindexing all blogger blogs for a day or two. But, you are right they tend to fix the issue rather quickly.
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Unfortunately this is one of the downsides to being at Google’s will. This is better than having your site heavily penalized in Google’s rankings and watching your revenue stream plummet!
There is not much we can do, Google is in charge and we must adapt to keep up. I’ve never liked that they can mark you a spam without warning, at least send out an email or a warning.
It is quite worrying how much power is concentrated in googles hands and how simple mistakes can reak havoc with peoples blogs.
Google always try to check their spam directory by doing such foul thing. I think they must change their algorithm not to block any good sites from being viewed.
I would try to get in contact with Google to resolve the situation. This does indeed happen from time to time but they should fix it.
Google should really do something about this. They should frequently check their database to avoid this kind of problems. There would be a lot of people that would be very disappointed if this happens again.