An interesting thing happened a couple of days ago that I thought I would share with you. A well known site in the internet marketing community disappeared. It didn’t fade off the charts due to lack of activity or anything like that. Rather, it was suddenly (and permanently) deleted by the blog hosting company. Here is the story.
As I often do, I try to stay up to date with people that are excelling in the internet business field. I contacted Alan Liew from moneymakerinfo.blogspot.com requesting to guest post to his blog. His site was #1 on Google for the term “make money online” for quite a while, so a properly linked article on his site would give this one quite a bit of “authority”. Alan contacted me to let me know that the post was scheduled to publish in the next couple of days. I went to his site the following day (as I often do) to read up on the latest posts, when I got the infamous “The blog you were looking for was not found”.
I wrote to Alan to ask him what happened, and he said that Blogger deleted the blog due to “SPAM”. Now, I know that Alan accepts guest posts, but I also know in his “author guidelines” he forbids submitting duplicate content. He told me that he does not spam, and I believe him. Personally, I think that if you already rank #1 in the SERPs for your chosen keyword, you don’t need to spam. Whether he was falsely accused, or there was some other reason that blogger chose not to share with him, we will likely never know.
So why am I bringing this up? I am mentioning this because I think there is a lesson to be learned in everything. I am not sure I know exactly what the lesson is, at this point, but I do what I got from it. Some of this is due to my own thinking, but most of it is what I got from the other members of TKA, when I brought the news to the members only forum.
A lot of people commented that you should not have your main money site hosted with bloggor.com. On the other hand, another very popular internet marketer – Griz, from makemoneyforbeginners.blogspot.com, was always quite proud of the fact that he was able to do so well with a blogger blog. There are quite a few very successful sites out there hosted by blogspot.com. After seeing what happened to Alan though, I am wondering if it is such a great idea. I always believed that blogger should be used for starting a new business and later use the authority to support a main money site. Once your business is growing, creating blogger blogs as support sites to link to your money sites is another great way to use them. I have done that with a few of my niches and it works well.
Another insight that hit home was a single word – “diversify”. Spread your eggs around a little. If you have 100 sites, losing one of them won’t hurt as much. Sure, if the one you lose is bringing in $3-$4k a month (like I’m sure Alan’s was), it will still hurt, but it won’t kill you. You can lose a site or two and still have others that are paying your bills every month.
One thing that occurs to me, and it shows up time and time again, is that it does not seem possible to be successful without having a big, red target painted on your forehead. The more successful you are, the more people try to drag you down. Do I think that is what happened here? I think so, yes. I have read more than a few posts from Alan’s site, and I never saw a problem with them. Quite a few of the posts were actually very good. I will admit that I even felt a little nervous sending him my article, although it was a good article in my opinion.
So what do you take from this? Do you have an opinion? If so, I would love to hear from you. Let me know what you think. In the mean time, Alan, I am sorry man. I am sure that you’ll start another internet business venture and succeed with it. When you do, let me know, so I can subscribe to it.
Steve
**Update May 7, 2010 – I have been out of the loop for a few days, while working on an SEO project for one of my clients, but I noticed today that Alan’s site is back up. I went over to his site and found an article about the whole situation. If you are intersted you can read it here: How I Got My Blog Deleted and Restored by Blogger.com
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It’s a hard lesson learned, isn’t it? If Google can just delete you, without even giving suggestions as to what to fix, you simply cannot trust hosting your blog there if you are using it as a means of income.
its quite simple, how could google give suggestions to someone like Alan to fix his blog as his blog was almost 90% PLR articles which could easily be found on other known sites in the same niche. He has been penalized due to copyright infringement, as per my understanding. And i don’t agree with those who think that it was some savage attack by google. Why don’t google delete Griz’s blog which is hosted on the same platform? The reason is that Griz produces extremely high quality and exceptional content unlike Alan who was just posting one PLR article (don’t know the source where he was getting those articles from) on his blog.
I wasn’t aware that he was posting PLR articles. Most of his most recent articles were guest posts, from what I’ve seen. This is the first I’ve heard of him posting PLR.
Offcourse he was posting PLR articles and if you ever tried to read his older posts, you would come to know that he was posting those older posts again and again on his blog. This is how he managed to update his blog on daily basis except for the guest posts which were mostly the re-writes of PLR’s or useless junk.
Hi Steve,
Thanks for mentioning my post.
After the blog deletion I’ve gone through, I can tell that it is very important to use a custom domain and a paid host when starting a blog to make money online. The small investment in hosting and domain are certainly worth it.
You’ll have full control over your blog and also if you have built up your blog for quite a long time and decided to retire it. You could sell it for a great profit as compared to free domain, you wouldn’t be able to sell it because your don’t own it.
No prob Alan. thanks for dropping by. I agree – self hosted is the only way to fly.
As allan was here, i would like to ask that is this deletion thing by Google a threat to the Adsense model being run my many people out there to generate a passive income?
In the system people build small niche sites and spray adsense all over it?
Thanks
It’s a good question, and one that is thrown around daily. My opinion is that if you are thinking of the searchers and trying to give them what they are looking for, you will be fine. If you are producing garbage, trying to fool Google, you will be struck down (to strain a metaphor). Read this: http://internetbusinessguide.info/online-earning-with-thin-mfa-sites-be-careful/ for more detail.