Philipp Lenssen noticed recently that the Google Custom Search blog, maintained by Google, was “marked as spam”. It’s scary to see this happen to an official Google blog because if it can happen to them, there is absolutely nothing to stop it from happening to you. The official blog was replaced by a single post by “Srikanth” saying:

Google Custom Search, is the wonderful product from Google which many webmasters have been looking and dream for. It allows webmasters to create their own custom search engines to search only the sites he/she wants.

Also Google Custom Search is integrated with Ad-sense, which means make money while keeping users on your site for longer time with custom search engine.

I’ll cover up more on this powerful tool very soon in my next blog.

Good Luck for all the Custom Search customers(??).

Cheers,
Srikanth

You could be writing a blog for months, following all the rules — then out of the blue Google could delete your blog and all it’s content, then let some random person start blogging on that very same domain.

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.

Should this happen to you, contact Google immediately to explain the situation so they can investigate. It would be nice to have more clarification from Google about what actually happened here, and what happens when a blog is “marked as spam”. From this most recent demonstration, it appears your blog is completely deleted and put back into the list of available blog names — allowing anybody to register it. What can we possibly do to stop this from happening to innocent bloggers?