Google's spam blog algorithm and recovery procedure called into question

Rupert Murdoch may be battling with Google over content, but the fight extends to individual entrepreneurs, too.
An experience suffered by Vincent Wright, a well known business networker and blogger, reveals a very poor grasp of basic website principles by a company that is expected to know far better, according to him.
Mr Wright, known to netizens in the business community for his networking and social media groups (including the My Virtual Power Forum, which numbers nearly 9,000 members) discovered Blogspot, owned by Google, had deleted his blog of four years, Social Media Consortium. While not unusual in itself—Google deletes, sometimes wrongly, legitimate blogs—the recovery process has been a string of broken promises, obstructions and even an alleged cover-up by the Mountain View, Calif. company.
In July, Wright noticed that Social Media Consortium (socialmediaconsortium.blogspot.com) was flagged as a “spam blog”, where Google’s algorithm wrongly identified it for having spam. The diagnosis was incorrect, so Wright fed in a Captcha code on a Google page to request a review.
He waited the ‘two business days’ the company promised. In fact, he waited for numerous two-business-day periods until September, during which he and other authors of the blog requested additional reviews from Google.
In this time, Google blocked access to Mr Wright and his co-authors to the blog, though it could still be seen online if the address were fed in. None of the new posts entered since July appeared.
By November, Google had completely deleted Mr Wright’s blog, along with any record of it ever existing in cache form.
‘We appreciate there is an algorithm to keep a lid on spam blogs, or splogs,’ said Mr Wright. ‘But there is no way Social Media Consortium would have failed a manual examination.
‘Google needs to stop promising that the examination is two business days. It’s beyond two weeks, beyond two months, and it’s coming up to two quarters.
‘I would have been fine if Google didn’t lie—didn’t do evil—over its own deadline.’
Mr Wright is incensed that the dialogue taken up between himself, co-author Jack Yan, and a Google help forum member called Nitecruzr has been protracted, prolonged and unhelpful.
‘We’re following the procedures laid down by Google. However, if you examine the five weeks’ discussion on the Google forums, it’s clear that Google Support is being deliberately obstructive,’ says Mr Wright.
The discussion can be viewed at www.google.com/support/forum/p/blogger/thread?tid=14d96e6088345650&hl=en .
The majority of entries on Mr Wright’s behalf, made by Mr Yan, show remarkable patience in following Google’s so-called procedure. Even in this, Google promises two-day reviews, not to mention one time where Mr Wright was to wait ‘until late afternoon’. As with Google’s every other promise, it was broken.
After missing another set of deadlines, Nitecruzr later informed both gentlemen that some of the Google inquiry would depend on the existence of a cached page from socialmediaconsortium.blogspot.com.
As Google had deleted all evidence of such a page, it made finding the proof particularly difficult.
The protracted part was Nitecruzr’s unwillingness to acknowledge the last cached page of the Social Media Consortium, which resides on Yahoo! Search.
‘Jack kept providing Nitecruzr with the cached page from Yahoo!, and Nitecruzr kept saying that it was not there. This went back and forth for weeks,’ says Mr Wright.
‘I can see the cache, Jack can see the cache, and numerous friends around the world can see the cache,’ he says.
The cached page, which shows entries from Wright’s blog, is indeed visible at Yahoo! Search, but there will be a limit on how long this will be available. A duplicate can be seen at jyanet.com/temp/cache.htm.
‘The more Google drags its heels, the more likely there will be no evidence left,’ says Mr Wright.
‘We have found Nitecruzr to come up with the flimsiest excuses for resisting to visit the cache, and one has to wonder if Google Support people are intentionally obtuse. It does not fit in with his fantasy that the page does not exist.
‘His latest excuse for saying a cache does not exist is by pasting the HTML code from the Yahoo! Search cache frameset, and as that does not show any references to socialmediaconsortium.blogspot.com, that is somehow determinative.
‘We somehow think he has finally seen the page, realized his error, and come up with a very lame excuse in the vain hope that we know nothing about framesets.
‘If so-called experts do not know the difference between a frameset and a framed web page, then this shows a very poor grasp of the very basics of the web.’
Mr Yan says that he even pasted the actual code from the correct frame in response, so that the forum would have a record. Just after Christmas, Google went and deleted that entry. ‘It’s as though they want to cover up any record of this blog existing.’
Mr Wright says he recognizes that Nitecruzr is not a Google employee and, by his own admission, his judgement is not final. However, both he and Mr Yan are concerned about the investigative technique being used, if it is representative of Google’s own. Nitecruzr appears to suggest in the dialogue that it is.
Mr Yan, who has a law degree, says the experience is a good lesson to not rely on Google or any free service for blog hosting.
‘Not only is your blog considered expendable, but there is a “guilty till proved innocent” approach,’ he says.
‘We provided all the evidence they requested, but what use is it when the evidence is not viewed or intentionally deleted?’
He says that Google services are generally good and that he has had ‘sterling’ service from other parts of the company. He also says numerous staff within his own company rely on Gmail with considerable success. His own personal blog is on Google’s Blogger service, which he says is ‘occasionally buggy, but tolerably so.’
Mr Wright agrees: ‘On most things, Google is marvellous. On this, it has been a nightmare, where we have complied with every request and followed every procedure, and we cannot help but think we are being singled out. We have seen blogs that were deleted only days and weeks ago restored in Google’s support forums, but five months is an awfully long time.
‘If there is a weak link in the Google empire, it is Blogspot.’