If You Use Blogger, Back Up Your Blog!

I woke up two mornings ago to find an email from Blogger:

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 "The Failed Author" was flagged to us for review. We have determined that it violates our guidelines and have made the URL https://www.thefailedauthor.com unavailable to blog readers.

Why was your blog removed?

Your content has violated our Malware and Similar Malicious Content policy. Please visit our Community Guidelines page linked in this email to learn more.

Malicious content? Did one of my promo site reviews piss off the wrong person? I wracked my brain trying to figure out what I'd done wrong. I hardly ever use profanity, which doesn't seem to be out of place anymore anyway. The only reason I could come up with was that one of the images I'd culled from Google contained some malicious code. I was more than willing to go back and delete every single image, which would have taken days, but I was locked out of my blog.

If you believe we made an error, you can request an appeal...which must be done within the next 90 days.

The link provided only allowed me to click an "appeal" button. There was no space for comments or questions.  

All that work. All those posts I'd thoroughly researched. All my personal stories---gone.

I went to bed that night heartsick. I'd tried to deal with Blogger in the past for a couple of issues, and knew they were unreachable. Try as I may, I could never find a support email address, because one doesn't exist. The only avenue is their "community", so I posted my dilemma there.

The next day, I decided to try (ironically) Google's AI to maybe glean a solution. I pasted the email in and asked, "What do you make of this?"

Well, guess what. 

You are caught in a massive automated false-positive glitch happening right now. 

An automated AI sweep on Google's system has mistakenly flagged and locked a large volume of innocent, long-standing blogs for "Malware and Similar Malicious Content". Users across Reddit and the official Google Help Forums are reporting the exact same symptoms: sudden bans, locked dashboards, and completely clean Search Consoles.

Whew! So, it wasn't me! I didn't do anything wrong, even inadvertently!

Maybe the problem would get fixed...quickly. But what if it didn't? What if no one even works in their engineering department and it's all a mirage? After all, company wide, no live person seems to exist.

AI then directed me to Google Takeout. 

"Even though you are locked out of the Blogger dashboard, your data belongs to your Google Account. Go to Google Takeout, uncheck everything except Blogger, and request a download. This will package your posts, pages, and photos into a downloadable file so your years of writing are safe, no matter what."

Years ago, I lost my Rich Farmers blog because I didn't renew my Google domain before the cutoff date. Yes, totally my fault, but there was no way to get it back. I finally had to buy a new domain, because mine was already owned (by me) and start over. I lost all my previous followers, of course. They never found me again. And of course, I'd never bothered to back up my data.

This time I leapt at the opportunity to download all my Failed Author posts and images. Sure, I'd need to transfer my domain to another site and start over, and there are no good free sites, sorry. AI suggested Substack (nope), Wordpress (tried it once; hated it), as well as Medium (really?), and something called Ghost, which I'd never heard of. I was prepared to go with either Medium or Ghost, since the other two were out of the question, but I like Blogger. At least I did. I guess one has to trade complete lack of support for ease of use. 

Once I downloaded my data, my nerves stopped jangling. The lump in the pit of my stomach went away. Losing my site would not be as devastating as losing a book manuscript, and I've read about several authors that happened to, but 1,174 posts is still a hell of a lot to lose.  

In the end, my site was restored.

Hello,

We have re-evaluated your blog against Blogger Community Guidelines. Upon review, the blog has been reinstated. You may access the blog at https://www.thefailedauthor.com .

Thank you for understanding.

I'm actually shocked that Google semi-apologized. Although the "understanding" part is doing a lot of heavy lifting. 

Can this happen again? Of course! So, I'm going to be more diligent from now on. I've got three other Blogger sites/websites, one of which is my author site---kind of important. I'm surfing over to Takeout now and preserving my data.