“Monetized” Blogger Blogs To Be Deleted By Google

I woke up this morning to discover that Twitter and the adult blogosphere are afire with news of Google’s latest dick move (I can think of no more polite phrase for it). Yesterday they apparently sent a mass email to all of their Blogger/Blogspot bloggers whose sites are flagged as adult (the ones with the click through warning before you can see the content) saying that they will “strictly prohibit the monetization of Adult content on Blogger” after June 30th (just four days from when they sent the letter).

ErosBlog has the complete email:

Important Update to Adult Content Policy on Blogger

You are receiving this message because you are the admin of a blog hosted on Blogger which is identified to have Adult content.

Please be advised that on June 30th 2013, we will be updating our Content Policy to strictly prohibit the monetization of Adult content on Blogger. After June 30th 2013, we will be enforcing this policy and will remove blogs which are adult in nature and are displaying advertisements to adult websites.

If your adult blog currently has advertisements which are adult in nature, you should remove them as soon as possible as to avoid any potential Terms of Service violation and/or content removals.

Sincerely,
The Blogger Team

This is HUGE bad news for the spanking blogosphere. It’s unclear how far Google will take “displaying advertisements to adult websites” — but who among us does not link to a spanking pay site from time to time? Does an Amazon affiliate link to a spanking ebook count? There are about fifteen spanking blogs in my sidebar hosted on BlogSpot, and many of them are at risk if they cannot completely overhaul and sanitize their links and banners in the next three days. Do not — I repeat, DO NOT — assume Google will only go after the horrible spammy porn blogs — Google does everything “algorithmically” which means their robot will cue your blog for deletion if it finds even one offending link in a five-year-old post. You can’t expect any advance warning and you can’t expect to appeal the deletion to a human being — Google does not hire humans to do this sort of work. If you host on blogspot.com, take this warning seriously. Can Google’s robots reliably tell the difference between an affiliate link and an unpaid link credit that you put in to a spanking paysite because you were posting one of their pictures? I would not count on it. I would not. What I tell you three times is true: I would not.

What’s more, if you’ve been doing this for awhile you doubtless know there are a ton of old spanking blogs (no longer updated) that linked to you years ago. Those links have been important to your page rank and search engine traffic even if the blog themselves are long dead. Who is going to update those long-dead blogs? Nobody, that’s who. And so many of them will be going away soon. Expect your traffic to decline accordingly.

According to the comments at ErosBlog, the link for backing up your Blogspot blog (so that you could, hopefully, move it to your own domain that you control) is here: Import And Export Blogs. A sex-toy blogger who is on this story has this advice for you, and I would take it word-for-word:

First things first: if you currently have a sex blog on Blogger, go back it up right this instant. Yes, now. Stop reading this, leave it in another tab, go into your Blogger dashboard and export your blog. The .XML file that you get will contain all your posts as well as the comments associated with them, but it won’t be of much use to you until you need to import it somewhere else. Still, GET IT. Also back up the Picasa album containing all your blog’s photos.

That’s vitally important. Once it’s gone, you can’t get it back. If you’ve got the XML file on your hard drive, getting your blog back online is fairly easy for someone who knows how (and if you have to, you could hire that person). Back up your blog, right now. Seriously.

One piece of advice for folks who are moving: consider not moving to another free blogging service. This sort of thing appears to be a trend; if the service you move to allows adult blogs this week, they might not allow them next week. (ErosBlog summarizes this corporate trend away from adult-friendly free services as “The Pornocalypse Comes For Us All.“) I’ve seen a bunch of spanking bloggers talking about moving to WordPress.com or Tumblr, but those are emphatically not adult friendly. Tumblr puts all its adult blogs in an invisible search ghetto, and tends to delete blogs with affiliate links even though the TOS only prohibit blogs deemed “primarily for affiliate purposes” or some such. And this kinky blogger’s bad experience with WordPress.com should be all the warning you need to stay away from them. Get your own domain and your own paid hosting account, people! It doesn’t have to be expensive and it’s the only way to be safe.

See Also:

  1. Molly commented on June 27th, 2013:

    I have a post on my site which is basically a 8 easy steps to self hosting for adult content guide.

    http://mollysdailykiss.com/2013/06/27/the-sky-is-falling/

    Mollyxxx

  2. Beware of Blogger as a host commented on June 28th, 2013:

    […] before Blogger acts (this should be done regularly regardless), or searching for another platform. The Spanking Blog has an excellent post on this […]

  3. Spankings of the Week - chross.blogt.ch commented on June 29th, 2013:

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  4. Your Adult Blogger/BlogSpot Blog Is At Risk – Bondage Blog commented on June 29th, 2013:

    […] For all the details and some more helpful links, see Spanking Blog’s post about this: Monetized Blogger Blogs To Be Deleted By Google. […]

  5. ‘…while the Internet appears to have expanded the public square (…) it has in fact shrunk’ (NSFW) commented on June 30th, 2013:

    […] For all the details and some more helpful links, see Spanking Blog’s post about this: Monetized Blogger Blogs To Be Deleted By Google. […]

  6. northierthanthou commented on June 30th, 2013:

    Wow, that is awful. It’s a shame to see how difficult it can be to communicate freely on the net these days.

  7. PDXExotic commented on June 30th, 2013:

    I used these directions:http://www.1nova.com/blog/2009/09/how-to-setup-wordpress-on-dreamhost-plus-configuration/ to setup my own hosted adult domains through Dreamhost. Haven’t had an issue at all regarding adult content from them in the four years since I did that.

  8. vzolin commented on July 1st, 2013:

    One thing people should know is that a hosting account is fairly inexpensive. I host my escort site (legal here in Brazil) for less than $40 dollar for every 3 months and my host is considered one of the most expensive.

  9. SpankBoss commented on July 1st, 2013:

    Vzolin, absolutely. If your site is very small there are even some $5.00-a-month deals in the US (on shared discount hosting) that might work. But typically I recommend people do some research, spend a little more, and get a domain from a solid host with great customer service and (ideally) a few “big porn” customers so they won’t see your site as anything unusual.

    PDX, I know people who have had troubles with DreamHost — not because of adult content, but just quality-of-service and customer-service issues, unexplained/unfixed downtime, that sort of thing. But that’s just a couple anecdotes and all the major providers will have some unhappy customers from time to time. I wouldn’t use DreamHost (or, even more emphatically, GoDaddy) but many people happily do.

  10. Parker commented on July 1st, 2013:

    For the record, I moved my blog to wordpress a couple of days ago as a precautionary measure. Today they pulled the plug:

    This blog has been deactivated because we believe it does not comply with the WordPress.com Terms of Service or advertising policy.

    If your blog is designed to promote affiliate links, get rich quick programs, banner ads, consists solely or mostly of duplicate or automatically generated material, or is part of a search engine marketing campaign, WordPress.com is not the place for you. Please use the Export feature to move your content to a more appropriate hosting service.

    So I’d say if anything WordPress is even more unfriendly then blogger, at least for now.

  11. SpankBoss commented on July 1st, 2013:

    Yeah, as I mentioned in my post WordPress.com is not an adult-friendly place. Definitely a frying-pan/fire move there!

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