Blogging Tip: Did Your Blog Go Missing?

In 2012, my blog went missing for a couple of days.

Talk about having a shock when I went to check my blog that morning to find it wasn't there... anywhere. I keyed in the url again, just to make sure. No. It. Was. Not. There. Talk about feeling frantic! What I did find was a note from Blogger saying that it had been removed. My beautiful life blog... removed???

Thankfully, computer savvy nephew helped me go through the info they gave in a link as to possible reasons why my blog might have been removed (we could be spammers, we could be violating copyright, or other terms of service policies, blah blah blah...).

We sent in a 'report' to Google for help in identifying the problem. And waited...and waited. Checked and waited some more. Checked... checked...checked. Nada.

At least I didn't feel 'alone' in the situation, for I found other people were experiencing the same thing. Looking at comments left by other bloggers (we'd queried Google about the potential problem), it seems that sometimes these things happen because Blogger is doing system maintenance and things happen when they are 'cleaning' up stuff.

It seems to also happen because there are so many not-nice bloggers who are spammers or are violating terms of service. In the mix of a ga-zillion users, the innocent blogger sometimes get caught up in the net (pun intended).

After the initial shock at the realization that yes, my whole blog and all my beautiful content was really and truly g-o-n-e from blogland, and getting in touch with the people at Blogger, I knew I needed to stop fretting about it. I felt a peace that I knew wasn't my own. After all, I remembered I often ask God to protect all my online stuff -- I felt I could anticipate a good ending to this story.


Let me say, too, that even though my blog had disappeared, I did have back ups of most of my content so I could have retrieved it, if necessary, with help from computer whiz nephew.

Thankfully, in a couple of days, my blog was back online. Everything was restored. All was in order. You can be sure that I was celebrating! You can be sure, too, I backed up my blog content right away.

Let this be a gentle warning, if you have been putting it off... please go back up your blog... and do it regularly. If you don't know how, check out this link: business2blogger

Gratefully glad to be back with you all,

Brenda
xox

Post updated January 2015