Apparently I Am Spam Now

Google notified me that they have disabled the website I created to promote the book I wrote under a different pen name. They have identified it as "spam". I checked the sender's address before opening the email, since this was so obviously crazy. No, it really did come from Google. The email stated that my blog violated their spam policy. Coincidentally, I penned a post only yesterday about letting this particular domain expire. Well, now I certainly will not!

After penning that post and noting that I hadn't updated the site in ages, I actually went in and added some content to it ~ content that WASN'T spam. In fact, it was a post I copied from my music blog, which has not been flagged. And, of course, shouldn't have been, since every word on the page was created by me. And the only link is the one to my book on Amazon.

What upsets me the most is the insinuation that I am not a trustworthy person, and am, in fact, a spammer. (FYI, I doubt that a spammer would put as much work into a site as I have.)

Google was kind enough to include an appeal link, which after clicking, leads to this:

Blogger's spam-prevention robots have detected that your blog has characteristics of a spam blog. (What's a spam blog?) Since you're an actual person reading this, your blog is probably not a spam blog. Automated spam detection is inherently fuzzy, and we sincerely apologize for this false positive.

We received your unlock request on April 12, 2024. On behalf of the robots, we apologize for locking your non-spam blog. Please be patient while we take a look at your blog and verify that it is not spam.

...which leads to this:

We rely on blog readers to report content that they find inconsistent with Blogger's Community Guidelines. When something is reported, it's not automatically removed. Reported content is reviewed by human reviewers to verify it violates those Community Guidelines. If it does, it is removed from Blogger. The author won't know who made the initial report.

So, was it AI or was it a blog reader that flagged my site? Since I have no readers that I am aware of ~ which Google Analytics verifies ~ the robots had damn well better apologize.

I am currently awaiting Google's response to my appeal. It has now been almost six hours. My advice to Google would be to concentrate on actual spammers. If they'd like some leads, I've encountered my share.