Thanks!
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I just wanted to thank WordPress for making a hard decision easier on me. I was debating which platform to host my business blog accounts on and thanks to the horrible lack of customer service on WordPress, I have decided to move all my blogs elsewhere.
I tried to contact WP every way I could imagine to find out why one of my older blogs was banned so that I didn’t make the same mistake with my business accounts. The only information I found was that WordPress can do this to any blog, you have no right to any of your content – or even a response for that matter, they won’t restore your content AND you lose all of your login information (just in case you were stupid enough to have two blogs under one username).
I feel so educated now and much more confident in facing these tough business decisions. Seeing as how I manage over 20 blogs as a means of income, I am encouraged that now I can share this important information with all of my clients as well, I am even considering doing an article on the topic for my social media accounts.
Good luck to you during these interesting technological times! Please remember that there are many options out there – you really should play nice, or at least respond when people ask for help – I don’t really care that you banned my blog, but not answering people is really rude. Marketing experts are saying that in 2009 customer service is EVERYTHING! But I guess we all have to learn the hard way! I know I did :)
Happy Trails!
Tara Deck
http://busybizwiz.wordpress.com (don’t bother going there though!) -
Sorry that you got banned.
What disturbs me, however, is that if by mistake I break the rules and get banned, I have no backup of my content and I lose all of it. Can I somehow back up all the posts I make ?
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very good question leetgamer – and one you should consider. If you have no backup (I would suggest your own hard drive) there is no way to get the information back.
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Well looks like I’ll have to manually copy and paste dozens of posts on microsoft word then eh ?
By the way, to which blog hoster are you moving now ? Cause if you’re banned from wordpress my friend, dark times await you. Blogspot and blogger are horrible. They’re full of adds and nasty themes which I detest.
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No, it doesn’t; why not look in the FAQ where there are instructions on downloading backups?
Having been here for over three years and seen many banned blogs, I can say that there’s no platform of which I’m aware that feels obligated to back up and restore material which is in violation of its terms of service.
Before committing to a platform, it’s a good idea to familiarize yourself with the terms of service. In fact, it’s simple responsibility.
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One of my clients refused to go with WordPress and recommended Moveabletype, so I was going to try that and use Gossimer Hosting – At least I know there that I’ll have access to my content should the world come to an end lol.
Good luck to you!
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I know you had a nasty shock, and I’m not entirely without sympathy. I make a living off ads on blogs, and just a few days ago Facebook deleted my account (as I knew they eventually would; it was registered under “raincoaster”). The point is, if you break MT’s rules, they’ll dump your blog just the same.
Familiarize yourself with the rules of whatever host you go with. And the law.
A cursory search of the FAQ or the forum here would tell you that paid advertising of the kind you had on that blog is banned. I mean, seriously, ONE search would have showed you that without any doubt. You MUST do this kind of research if you’re going to try to be in business.
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Also, do NOT make the mistake of thinking MT is comparable to WP in terms of SEO, since that seems to be something on which you’re offering advice. If you want to go independent, go with something more modern than MT, like WP.org, which is free and has no advertising restrictions.
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@leetgamer-if you want to backup your blog, in your Dashboard go to Tools>Export and download the xml file. http://support.wordpress.com/export/
@basicallygood- WordPress.COM is a free hosted service which has a Terms of Service. http://support.wordpress.com/suspended-blogs/ http://en.wordpress.com/types-of-blogs/ If you want to run a blog that doesn’t conform to those Terms of Service, then the free hosted service isn’t the right choice for you. You can use the WordPress.ORG software on your own paid hosting.
BTW-since this is a user-to-user help forum, I don’t imagine that staff will see your post. Good luck wherever you go.
(Aw, rain! No FB?!)
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No FB, and all of my friends are so lazy none of them are Recommending new friends to me. I’m at 1/4 what I used to be, dammit. And FB won’t let me add new people at a rate of more than 10 or so a day.
But, as I said, I always knew it was coming. I can’t bitch about it too much.
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I really appreciate your suggestions and advice. I have read all the recommended documents and followed every course of action I could find to get an answer. As helpful as those 150 words on banned blogs were, I still don’t know how they determin what an ‘AD’ is. I did not violate any of the below that they mention – so what did I do?
“….AdSense-type ads, sponsored / paid posts including PayPerPost, ReviewMe and Smorty; affiliate / referral links to the following domains: usercash, clickbank, clickhop, cashrocks, payingcash; clicktrackers (and any similar) and any promotion of the “I made a million on the internet and so can you” type of advertising (i.e. MLM, network marketing, cash gifting, etc.)”
They really should clarify it a bit better so us morons can figure it out. All I wanted to know was, WHY? I’ve never come across a service that wouldn’t at least shoot you an auto-message if there was a problem or some kind of advanced warning before they zap all your articles into oblivion. I used it to hold training articles and interesting Diggs – not promoting porno or Ponze schemes.
Like I said – hard lesson learned. I am done trying to contact staff – I just think that all the other people out there like me, that are expecting help – should know the truth :) I do intend to ask very pointed questions BEFORE I sign up for my next account – but TOS & help don’t always provide what you really need to know.
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Poking around I ran across another wordpress.com blog tied to your name and the blog is covered in links leading back to what seems to be your commercial site.
So referring back to the ToS, “unwanted commercial content designed to drive traffic to third party sites” and the FAQ on Types of Blogs, “SEO blogs: Blogs that are written for search engines instead of humans. These blogs are dedicated to trying to fool Google and other search engines into ranking them or the sites they link to highly. WordPress.com is not meant for this type of activity.”
‘Nuf said.
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If the only reason you have a free blog at wp.COM is to drive traffic to your self-hosted commercial site, or to some site where you are getting paid per post, then that is against the Terms of Service. You blog could/will be suspended.
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So if my name is associated with anything online, those are ads?
I do social media training as the director of a nonprofit organization and assist other nonprofits with social media, my name ends up in many places – I don’t own a commercial site, so not sure how that measures in either. If my blog was making money – I wish somebody would have told me! I could use the extra pennies.
I’m SURE there is something I did do wrong, that is not the issue, I just think that I deserve to know exactly what it was. Since I’m not finding anything in TOS that I violated and nobody will return my emails – I can’t help but be curious why all the smoke and mirrors?
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Don’t be obtuse.
Paid advertising of ANY nature is banned on WordPress.com. And we can see it on the Google cache of your site.
Be business like, chalk it up to experience, and move on.
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I’m really not trying to be obtuse.
I would like to see where it says
in the ToS or Advertising area
exactly what I added to my blog
that violated their policy.<period>Here is what it says:
Adsense, Yahoo, Chitika, TextLinkAds and other ads are not permitted to be added by users
In addition to AdSense-type ads, please do not use the following services on your blog:
sponsored/paid posts including PayPerPost, ReviewMe and Smorty;affiliate / referral links to the following domains:
….usercash, clickbank, clickhop, cashrocks, payingcash;
….clicktrackers (and any similar)
….and any promotion of the “I made a million
….on the internet and so can you” type of advertising
….i.e. MLM, network marketing, cash gifting, etc.Would anybody be so kind as to tell me whether it was when I signed up for blogcatalog? technorati? I used a referal to oDesk…but thats not on their bad domain list. Did I post a link that referenced an affiliate site that I’m not aware of? Was it a comment? A book listing? I don’t use any PayPerPost or sponsored ads…why is this so hard?
and why do I get more help out of a user forum than from a business’ help site?
It’s just bad business if you ask me!
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Would you build a retail store on land you’d leased without even investigating whether or not you were allowed to sell things under the terms of that lease?
As I said, the most cursory search of the forum would show you where you’d gone wrong. You hosted an advertisement for Gossimer hosting, among others, which anyone can see in the cache of your blog; the onus is on you to prove that you didn’t accept payment or payment in kind for that.
If you want to do business, you should know that it costs money to make money. Building a business on a free platform which you apparently investigated ONLY to the extent of determining it was free is a bad business choice.
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I agree with raincoaster. Much of the sidebar content, including feeds, is at the very least questionable. And when posts begin with this:
“Are you looking for inbound or outbound links? Just post a comment to this page, link to me and lets get started creating quality content together!”
and proceed to list links to places with names like SEO Linkvendor, I can’t help but be amazed it wasn’t ToSsed earlier.
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