OMG - Another Reason Why You Should get Your Own Domain

Is that what my dad was talking about when he said "you get what you pay for". lol
I've lost content before and it really stinks. So yes get your own.

I love the way you put this, but it is 100% true.

That had happened to be (by mistake) with wordpress, however, they did give me all the content in a doc-type format.....yes, I now own my own domain!

I am not quite sure why it happened but since lately I have been hearing that google have been deleting blogger blogs.

All I know that is a great loss... who ever the owner is I feel real bad for him/her

Yeah, I took note of that blog disappearing completely.. The owner of that blog is Alan Liew and he started that website back in 2000. Great person! - and had been #1 for "make money online" for a long time.. He was making a killing. Shoot, he had almost 50,000 backlinks pointing to that bad ace website. I hope he can recover from this and get it back there.

Because I am also targeting that keyword phrase, I could only wonder if I would ever pass him up in Google...lol - Almost there!

Anyways, blogger had sent out an email to everyone that had a free blogger account, that some crazy things were going to happen ( I can't find the email otherwise I would post it here). They didn't say they were going to delete any blogs, but I'm very happy that I took note of that email and moved on to a self-hosted domain and wordpress.

I really couldn't believe that it happened, but you just never know - both online and offline!

Wow. Good to know. I'm working on some blogger blogs just to test keywords, then I'll be moving up to a real domain and website.

But I was toying with the idea of just sticking with the blogs and letting them make money. Now I know that isn't a reliable idea!

Thanks for this post!

Actually, it seems that Google changed the rules.

There's nothing to sue over. You agree to their terms of service when you open an account. The data wasn't lost, it was deleted intentionally, most likely for violating the terms of service.

That's why I've always had my own domain names for anything core to my business. I don't even host all my sites on one host, I have four different hosts. Putting all your eggs in one basket is seldom a good idea, and that includes the hosting basket.

They also wouldn't have ranked for such competitive terms. People use blogger because google views their own properties with preference.

I don't understand either... Very - Very - Very Weird!

So many people posted very useful information there that would help anyone looking to get into the Internet Marketing field. Hopefully he has or had a backup plan.

I remember coming across quite a few threads where people were stating that their blogger accounts were being deleted with no reason... I hope everyone that read those, along with me, moved on to getting hosting and a domain.

Perhaps, but unlikely, more likely to be the latest victim of Google's recent blogspot rampage. It was only the other day that I was reading how some guy lost his blogspot blog and he was using the cache to rescue the content.

The fact is Google reserves the right to strip anybody's site whenever they like. Everyone should be taking notice and making a conscious decision to building up their own web properties where possible. Web 2.0 properties have their place, hell I use them, but if all my lenses and external blogs got zapped tomorrow it wouldn't be a showstopper.

The problem with Blogspot is that once you start going down that road, and building up some authority in the SERPs for keywords, then there's nothing you can do to safeguard yourself. As far as I know you can't 301 a blogspot account!

I liken this to a situation my aunt had with her IT training business a couple of years ago. The whole business relied on grants from the government for getting people trained in basic IT skills. The funding got cut, the business folded.

If your business is fully dependent on something that you don't control then you'd better make sure you have a contingency plan, unlike my aunt :S

His alexa ranking was pretty good and everytime I posted there I got about 60 visits to my site. Given all the ads and distractions that were on the page, I'll assume a 5 - 10% click through rate, so I'd say easily 1,000 + hits per day.

Unfortunately, you do have to rely on someone else when it comes to your business.

If you use shared or virtual hosting, you'll be relying on the hosting company to keep your sites up and not boot you from their servers for some reason. If you co-lo, you may still have problems. If you locate on-site, you'll be depending on a team of employees and the power and telcom grids to allow you to operate. For example, one company I used to work for had the building next door go up in flames and our primary servers were offline for over a week while power and phone lines were cut and being repaired after the fire.

Basically, you have to decide who's worth relying on and who's not and this does change over time. I used to think that Google's Blogger was reliable as long as you weren't auto-create spam blogging but, obviously, that's no longer the case and they can no longer be relied upon.

I'm really crushed to here this. I had been stoping by his
blog 3 to 4 times a month for the last 3 years.

I feel his pain. I didn't trust Blogger ever, and now
they are killing a lot of great marketers blogs and
years of their work are disappearing.

This is heart breaking. Please folks, get your own domain
and hosting.

As others have already said, it's not that this guy didn't want to spend
money on hosting and a domain. He certainly could afford it.

The problem is, this same blog, started on his own domain....

would have done nowhere near the traffic.

He did well because of Google's ownership and preference for the platform.

Unfortunately, once they decide that they aren't getting anything out of
YOUR efforts, they simply toss you into the scrap heap.

It's the kobayashi maru all over again.

Google is essentially a dictatorship. And please don't give me that crap
about breaking TOS.

If the blog broke TOS, then it did it from day 1 because nothing on that
blog has changed, as far as type of content, in years.

So why now? Why after 4 years can it?

TOS?

Bull sh*t!

Google is what it is...the most evil entity on the Internet and I am just
thankful to God that they don't account for more than $200 a month of
my total income.

So when they someday kick my ass to the curb, I can smile, give them
the finger and not give a sh*t.

You rely on Google, you have a fool for a business owner.

Commercial real estate

Street vendor laws

Eminent Domain abuses

I guess some people just don't get it....

It's not on Blogger because he was "too cheap" to get hosting.

This guy should be happy he was able to milk this for as long as he did. He should have known this day was coming and prepared for it.

I completely agree on this one.

And for those of you thinking he wouldn't get the same traffic with his own hosted domain, another thing that baffles me. If most of you said he gives valuable content and lots of followers, then he wouldn't have problem following him anywhere, i would. If he can get that blog made gazillions, then he definitely wouldn't have a problem monetizing and ranking even a .info domain that is hosted.

I don't understand at all and sorry to say that I don't empathized.

It's really hard for me to trust the credibility of a business if they are to cheap to buy a domain name/hosting. Agreed ^

It's probably a no brainer to have your own domain. I still don't know why people still go for free blogs these days.

You folks are missing the point.

I knew Blogger's TOS inside and out. Why? Because of all the problems with
WordPress blogs hosted on WordPress. You absolutely cannot use them for
the purpose of making money...period.

Blogspot has NO such provision in its TOS and if you read their TOS (at
least the one from about 6 months ago, last time I looked) and then looked
at this guy's blog, there was absolutely nothing in his blog that was in
violation.

Nothing.

So Google changes the rules after 4 years?

WTF?

That's like a guy walking into a store and saying "Hey, I want to use your
widget for my business. Can I use it like this?" And the guy says, "Sure"

4 years later he knocks on the guys door and says, "I changed my mind.
You can't use my widget for that anymore" and takes it away...putting
the guy out of business.

Bull sh*t!

And those wanting to call this Google bashing, sour grapes or whatever
else you want to call it, have a talk with some very respected Warriors
here (I won't mention names) and ask them what they think of Google
as an evil entity.

They are what they are...evil beyond anything I've seen online in my 7
plus years of doing business on it.

You can bash this poor guy for, as you call it, putting all his eggs in one
basket. But he had absolutely NO reason to believe this would ever happen
to him...certainly not after 4 years.

If Google had a problem with this blog, it should have been yanked
immediately.

And nobody is going to change my mind about that no matter what they
say.

So yes, this is something we're never going to agree on.

So be it.

Google sucks. Google is evil. And I pray every night that they go out of
business someday.

I recently was planning on incorporating google blogs into one of my strategies. Forget it now. I would only use blogger for a temporary solution. Any compeditor could shut you down by clicking on your adsense all day if you depended on that for your income. If 'SPAM' really was the reason, it could just as easily be that all the make money bloggers were spamming his blog with their spammy automated spam posts. I can't say one way or the other without more info.

This is eye opening, though.

Hi,
If you look at the link provided in the OP you can see that the image above the text has been replaced by a poorly fitting 'hotlinking disabled' image - placed there (presumeably) by the person who's image he was hotlinking to (which appears to be cambridgebusinessacademy dot com).

Perhaps he was hotlinking lots of images and they complained to Google. Also, all of the articles on the front page are 'guest posts' - perhaps google didn't like this either?

He's also got twelve 'sponsors' ads, a banner at the top, three adsense blocks, an affiliate link in the navigation bar, a 'write for us' link and an 'advertise with us' link.

Overkill? Asking for trouble?