You may have noticed the small message in the upper right corner yesterday where I said that due to 'technical difficulties' I was not able to post. These 'technical difficulties' were not caused by me, but by the almighty robots of Google.
Yesterday morning, just as I was ready to post to the blog, I got an email from Google telling me The Presurfer was caught in a 'spam trap.' Next month, this site will be 8 years old and I have never, ever, spammed anyone or anything. You can imagine my confusion, and my anger.
Fortunately, I happen to know a wonderful guy. His name is Philipp Lenssen and he manages Google Blogoscoped, one of my favorite blogs. Philipp contacted Matt Cutts, head of Google's webspam team and now, 24 hours later, I am able to post again.
So, all's well that ends well? Not really! Yes, I am very grateful to Philipp and Mr. Cutts, but this is not the way it's supposed to work. If not for Philipp, who else would be able to help me? And reading several forums on the internet about this subject, I realize it's not just me. It happens to a lot of people. There's a lot of frustration going around. It usually takes longer before people are able to use their site again.
And most important of all is that I still don't know what caused this. Google doesn't tell me why the site was blocked and why the site was unblocked. And as long as I don't know, how am I going to prevent this of happening again? Why can't (or won't) Google do something about this?
In the meantime I'm looking elsewhere. I am already experimenting with Wordpress which is a good alternative. The problem is that I really like Google's Blogger service but they are not treating me nice and they are sometimes giving me a hard time. Now, all I can do is hope this doesn't happen again. But if it does, I'm moving!
UPDATE: I now know what happened. It was a bug in Google Blogger's data processing code.
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