A few days ago I received an email that one of my Blogger blogs has been removed.
Hello, As you may know, our Community Guidelines (https://blogger.com/go/
contentpolicy) describe the boundaries for what we allow– and don’t allow– on Blogger. Your blog titled “http:// ***. blogspot.com/” was flagged to us for review. We have determined that it violates our guidelines and have made the URL http:// ***. blogspot.com/ unavailable to blog readers. Why was your blog removed? Your content has violated our SPAM policy. Please visit our Community Guidelines page linked in this email to learn more. If we feel that a blog’s content does not fit within the expectations of our Policy, we no longer allow it to be publicly available. If you believe we made an error, you can request an appeal https://www.blogger.com/go/ appeal-blog?blogId= 1247835869551779889. You may have the option to pursue your claims in court. If you have legal questions or wish to examine legal options that may be available to you, you may want to consult with your own legal counsel. Sincerely, -The Blogger Team
The blog was not in use
The weird thing about this removal is that this particular blog/domain was not even being used. I mean, I didn’t even have an active blog on this domain. There were no articles, photos, no content on the blog at all. It was just an empty blog with a default blogger template. I did register this domain long ago, in order to use it at some point in the future, but I never got around to it.
With that in mind, I have no idea why Blogger removed it. It must have been their algorithm which picked up on something and removed the blog. But there was nothing for the algorithm to pick on, so I can’t make any sense as to why this happened.
If I visited the blog at this point, this is what I landed on:
Blog has been removed
Sorry, the blog at ***.blogspot.com has been removed. This address is not available for new blogs.
Did you expect to se your blog here? See: ‘I can’t find my blog on the Web, where is it?’
Appealing the removal
At this point I visited the blog through my Blogger dashboard, and this page opened:
Note: this blog has been locked
This blog was removed for violating Blogger’s Community Guidelines. If you wish to request a review of the blog, click ‘Request Review’ below. It will be permanently deleted within 90 days.
So I clicked the “Request Review” button, and this opened:
Request Blog Review
This blog was removed for violating Blogger’s Community Guidelines. It will be permanently deleted within 90 days. If you wish to request a review of the blog, click “Request Review” below. Once you’ve requested a review, Blogger will re-evaluate the blog against guidelines and take action as necessary within a few days.
Once I clicked the button, this little popup appeared at the bottom of my screen
We have received the request for a review and will email ***@gmail.com once the blog has been re-evaluated
After I did all this and visited the URL of my blog, this page opened:
Note: this blog has been locked
We received the request for a review on Oct 25, 2024. Blogger will re-evaluate the blog to verify it is not in violation of Community Guidelines.
At this point I appealed the suspension, and I was waiting for them to review and get back to me…
Blog reinstated
To my surprise, a few hours later I received an email that my blog has been reinstated :-)
Hello, We have re-evaluated your blog against Blogger Community Guidelines https://blogger.com/go/
contentpolicy. Upon review, the blog has been reinstated. You may access the blog at http:// ***. blogspot.com/. Thank you for understanding. Sincerely, The Blogger Team
At this point the blog was reinstated, and that was the end of it.
Here is a video I made talking about this:
Summary
In the end, I have no idea why the blog was removed. But the appeal process was simple, and they replied/reinstated my blog very quickly, so good job.
Though I will say, I was not allowed to “state my case” when requesting a review of the removal. In a different situation, I would probably have wanted to explain why I think the blog was wrongfully removed. But in this case it was a very simple situation, and any person or algorithm that reviewed the situation would have reinstated the blog.