Google Deletes Custom Search Blog After Marking It As Spam

Aug 9, 2007 at 8:37am ET by Barry Schwartz

Google Custom Search Blog Hacked? from Google Blogoscoped quickly reported what appeared to be a hack of Google’s official Custom Search Blog. But what really happened was that Google marked their own blog as a spam blog and ultimately removed the blog from Blogger, allowing someone else to claim the URL.

Google sent Google Blogoscoped a response detailing the issue:

Whoops! We accidentally classified ourselves as spam, and our ever-perceptive Blogger settings caught us. The Custom Search Blog has since been restored, and we’re taking steps to ensure this doesn’t happen with other Google blogs in the future. Other Blogger users can make sure this doesn’t happen to them by reporting any problems to the Blogger support team via the Blogger Help Center at http://www.blogger.com/problem.g. We can then investigate.

PC World has more details explaining that the notification sent to the bloggers at the Custom Search Blog was “overlooked” and after a period of time, the Custom Search Blog was deleted.

Soon after the blog was removed, it appeared that the blog was then hacked. But Google quickly restored the blog to the rightful owners, themselves.

Google Security: Google Mac Blog Hacked & Google Calendar Users Not Being Safe covers other hacking and oddities that have hit official Google blogs.

Barry Schwartz is Search Engine Land's News Editor and owns RustyBrick, a NY based web consulting firm. He also runs Search Engine Roundtable, a popular search blog on very advanced SEM topics. Barry's personal blog is named Cartoon Barry and he can be followed on Twitter here.

See more articles by Barry Schwartz >

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