Flimflammed by a Splog!
June 10th, 2006 by MarkAs my long-time readers know, I started my blog on Blogger at http://doubtingtoshuo.blogspot.com. I later moved it to http://toshuo.com mostly because John emailed me and told me I was blocked in China. Wordpress kind of annoyed me at the outset, but I’ve since gotten pretty accustomed to running a blog on my own domain and like it.
There’s one problem, though. I still get a fair amount of search engine traffic from a page I wrote about the Back Dorm Boys at http://doubtingtoshuo.blogspot.com/2005/10/back-dorm-boys.html. That page is still just like I left it months ago. Unfortunately, some splogger has taken over my domain. I tried to set my blogger preferences to publish at my old address, just for the purpose of wiping out the splog, but it won’t let me. I had assumed that with my whole site still there, it was safe from being over-written. I guess I was wrong and that people are free to over-write my old entries with spam one URL at a time, and even cash in on the reasonably high page rank my blog had built up. I’ve emailed Google about it since they own Blogger, but they haven’t responded.
The moral: if you ever decide to host a Blogger blog on your own server, make sure you always set your site address back to your old blogspot URL after publishing in your own domain.
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June 10th, 2006 at 1:46 pm
Mark-san,
Blogs on Blogger are still blocked in China. You need to use proxy servers to access them. And regrettably the Communist Party recently began to block google.com all over the world except for google.cn which Google lets the CCP censor. You have not been able to access google.com even if using proxies.
But I have just found today that google.com is not blocked anymore here in China, at least in my town in Jilin province. I do not know if this revival is temporary or not. It might be because of the press conference held by Reporters Without Borders on the 6th of June, which criticised this Google case.
As for emails, much difficulties receiving them from Japan with mailers have been reported in China. What is worse, the CCP sometimes blocks webmails such as Hotmail and Gmail. I cannot believe that the country which wants to attract more tourists and investments does not let foreigners to use emails !
June 10th, 2006 at 6:06 pm
Kanwa-Kyudai,
Actually, these past few weeks Google has never been completely blocked in Shanghai. It’s just been giving spotty service.
June 10th, 2006 at 7:49 pm
mark! I need your help with Technorati. My blog has dropped out of technorati completely.
Michael
June 11th, 2006 at 10:24 pm
Strongbad: “Your head a splog!”
June 12th, 2006 at 2:23 am
Micael, I see Technorati as listing you as:
Rank: 14,766 (488 links from 137 sites)