How I Lost my Blog and Here’s to a New Beginning

Let me start this post with the bad news first. My 6 years old blog SEO-KOLKATA.BLOGSPOT.COM has been deleted by Google and is available no more.

Now the Good News – before the blog got deleted I was able to export all my content out of blogspot and have successfully imported the same to WordPress in this blog. So basically this is the same blog, with same content but with the content available in a much more well organized manner and also some additional features. I was also able to set up proper redirection for my feeds as it was set up with Feedburner ( though I still lost more than half my subscribers during this transition). In case you have not subscribed to the feed yet, you can definitely do it now here.

Seo-kolkata.blogspot.com has now moved to digitalsrc.com/blog

How popular was the SEO Kolkata Blog ?

Well, I have been posting very rarely on this blog for the last 2 years ( may be 3-4 posts in a year) and yet I had around 260 subscribers on Feedburner ( today it has gone down to 160 with all this problem) and a Facebook page with almost 600 likes. The blog had links from authority websites like SearchEngineLand.com and SearchEngineJournal.com – and now they are all gone 🙁

So why did Google/ Blogger delete my blog ?

In short, because I wanted to move the blog to WordPress and set up a 301 redirection from my Blogspot blog, so my visitors could find the content easily and also to prevent my blog from losing all its hard earned links and search engine rankings . This redirection thing ticked off the “intelligent” “automatic spam detection system” in Blogger and Google deleted my blog identifying it as a spam blog.

Did I do anything to restore the blog?

Yes, I tried. Submitted a review request with Google. Also escalated the issue in Google Product forum for blogger, only to receive some stupid answers ( for e.g, why don’t you create two blogs one in Blogger and one in WordPress ? ) from one of their evangelists. If you are interested, you can go through the entire discussion here.

What I gathered from the discussion is that Google’s standing on the issue is that you can use our platform( Blogger ) to create content but if you ever plan to leave we will make sure that you are going to lose all the credibility and loyal visitors that your content has earned over the years. And you have to start from ZERO.

Why did I move the blog from Blogger to WordPress

Because Blogger Sucks ! I was tired of waiting for Blogger and expecting them to update at least the basic features, for example..
a) Categories
b) Creating Pages
c) Sticky Posts

Not to mention the thousands of amazing plugins in WordPress that makes your life so much easier and allows you to do so much more.

The only advise I will have for a new blogger is to please use WordPress do not fall for Blogger’s apparent simplicity.

What am I going to do now?

I wanted to re-focus on blogging and that’s one of the primary reason I moved to WordPress. I will be updating the blog more frequently now on and you can find them all here. It is definitely difficult to start from ZERO ( yes that is my traffic count as on date, in spite of all the awesome content here) but I will try to build up on that. If you can give me a hand by sharing the posts socially, that would definitely be a great help !