Take a look at the old site for yourselves: http://gastronomydomine.blogspot.com. The content's all vanished, and has been replaced by what looks like a Google pagerank scamming thing. I'm baffled. Is there anything I can do about this? I'm going to go through Technorati and check that anyone linking to the old site is informed about what has happened so they're not linking to whoever this spammer is, but I'm *hopping* mad.
I also have an RSS question - it seems that all my RSS feeds at the old domain are pointing at the blogspot address. I'm an RSS moron. Any idea how I can change this?
This Post was written by Liz (Squeezeweasel) from Gastronomy Domine.
10 comments:
I have no idea how they do it, but this is a scam to get people to click on google ads. If you click on any of the links in the second post it takes you to a page of ads. It must be incredibly annoying. Don't you still have access to the blog? Sorry I have no idea how to fix the RSS.
It's OK - I think I've managed to fix the RSS. As far as the link spammer goes - no idea. I don't have any access to the old blog - my editing rights went with me to the new domain. I'd love to know how someone's been able to do it...
Yargh.
I don't understand why you don't still have access to the blog. As far as I can tell, the url that has been hijacked refers to a Blogger blog and your new blog is also a blogger blog. But haven't you simply mapped your old blog to a new address? If so, you should still have exactly the same publishing rights on both. In effect, the newer one is just a proxy for the older one.
I use Typepad and originally my blog only ever appeared at silverbrowonfood.typepad.com. I then decided to map it to www.silverbrowonfood.com. But if you look at either of those domains you'll see the same things - posts layout etc.
This is a long and convoluted way of saying, are you sure you can't alter your original blogger blog?
Yup - positive. When you upload your blog to an ftp site with Blogger, you lose editing rights to the old blogspot address - unfortunately, you don't get the same deal you do with Typepad.
MY. Talk about the #1 reason NOT to migrate from Blogger to publishing with Blogger with your own domain. What a flaw ... and hard to think what'd be in it for Google.
try using Feedburner.com. you get a valid feed that's autodiscoverable by most readers and you have control over your feed. You need to do a redirect: here is a link for a tutorial about how to do it, it uses feedburner, but you can do this with any feed.
http://blog.plinkd.com/2006/05/23/how-to-redirect-your-old-rss-feed-to-feedburner/
it seems daunting, but its not that hard.
There IS a way around this but it is too late for you. When you move like you did, Google/Blogger releases the old blogspot domain back into the blogspot pool. Immediately log in and claim your old domain as a new domain you want - and don't publish to it.
but if someone already took it it is gone...you could try appelaing to google/blogger since they are clearly spam but I doubt it'll help...
Ah - I see. What a pain in the arse. I've checked the Blogger TOS agreement, and a link spam blog like this is against that agreement, so I may (once I manage to start talking to a human rather than their automated response system) be able to get them to remove it. If not, I'll issue them with a takedown notice because there's copyrighted content on there. Which is using a lot more elbow that I'd like to, but I really can't think of another way round it.
For others thinking about moving... You don't need to "release" the blogspot URL. Just change your publishing info to point to your new domain and leave your old blog there if you want. When I moved my blog, I published everything to my domain, then reset the publishing info back to blogspot and published one final blog pointing folks to the new blog. The blogspot blog is still there, almost 2 years later. In fact, I asked Blogger to delete it 6 months ago, in fears of getting penalized for duplicate content but that hasn't happened.
Good news - Blogger just got back to me, and have taken the whole thing down. I've claimed the old site myself...and am treating the whole experience as a salutory lesson.
Time to go and turn those potatoes over.
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