Update Feb. 2012 – I wrote this about 5 years ago, the day my WordPress blog got deleted. I never got the blog back permanently. Joseph, who works for Automatic, helped me get my blog back and then it got deleted again. I gave up and hosted my own blog. Read the comments – more than ONE affiliate link is all you need to get your blog deleted. Wait, you didn't read the terms of service either? You're taking your chances. Just to be obnoxious I put an affiliate link in this post. If I were really obnoxious I would've put two in. Yes, free has a price.
I don't know if WordPress is cracking down lately or I'm just having bad luck. I've had this wordpress hosted blog for over a year: www.newspapergrl.wordpress.com. It took on a life of it's own so I left it. Some of the comments were excellent and I didn't want to lose them. Now, everything is gone. I didn't back it up. It had a higher pagerank than this version. All those broken links, heartbreaking.
WARNING: WordPress will delete your blog with no warning and no recourse. I would remove all ads if I'd known. That's no excuse according to WordPress. No mercy. They should have a big warning that says if you put advertising on your blog it will be deleted.
I advise anyone using WordPress to host their blog on their own servers so this doesn't happen to you. Especially businesses. You can't afford to take the chance.
Here's what greeted me today:
This blog has been archived or suspended for a violation of our Terms of Service. They say: “We take complaints seriously, but please be aware that unless a blog clearly violates our Terms of Service we will not disable it.” I don't believe it.
This is maddening. How do I get my blog back?
Get your own blog WordPress can't delete (not the free version hosted by WordPress)! That's what I finally did. Bluehost will help you install your blog and host it for about $7 (updated: prices have dropped, it's now $3.95 a month). They have someone there if you call day or night 24/7 – amazing customer service:
Reliable, Affordable Business & Blog Hosting from Bluehost.com.
Sorry to hear that happened to you. Use the “wayback machine” to view your old website so that you can back it up:
http://web.archive.org/web/*/www.newspapergrl.wordpress.com
WordPress.com doesn’t allow commercial content, so you got suspended because of the ads. You are allowed 1 affiliate link per blog, nothing else.
Contact support at: http://wordpress.com/contact-support/ you’ll update the blog to be line with the TOS.
Janet,
Immediately go to Google, type in site:newspapergrl.wordpress.com and access the cache link for each of your pages. You have hundreds of pages cached at Google. If you bring up the cached page, hit view source, you can even copy the original html for each post you had.
I know this will be a bit time consuming, but you can recover quite a bit this way. But don’t wait too long! Do it before Google refreshes their cache.
You advocate affiliate marketing. That means you are a pariah.
I am also a pariah. I was really depressed when I first realized that I was a pariah. In the long run, I find they make better company.
As for WordPress. I suspect that they are dealing with so much spam that they have to throw out a large number of babies with the bath water. One blog I hosted had 180,000 spams thrown at it in a month. I ended up throwing away all of the comments as it was to difficult to separate the good from bad.
WordPress is probably dealing with several million SEO spam posts a month. They have probably concluded that all affiliate and SEO marketing is spam.
Personally, I believe that there is good affiliate marketing and bad affiliate market. Likewise, there is good SEO marketing and bad SEO marketing. The mature approach is to promote the good and weed out the wicked.
The exact same thing happened to me in April. WordPress.com deleted all my blogs (6 of them), dating back to 2003.
I got no warnings, no reminders, nothing. The blogs were there at 3pm, and gone at 4pm. I tried to contact the WP folks a number of different ways, but they refused to talk to me. I also had no backup, and no way of retrieving many of the posts.
I finally got an answer by whining on the Blog World Expo blog. A staff member of WP said that I had affiliate links which they considered to be ads. Mind you, not all 6 blogs had affiliate links, just one, but they killed all of them.
I have shifted back to Blogger, and only will do WP on my own hosted sites. I learned two things from this experience: 1) no good deed goes unpunished; and 2) the Universe is trying to tell me to spend my time on something else for now.
Janet, I know you are a nice person, because a nice person I know emailed me asking about this issue.
Because of the commercial nature of the content, it probably isn’t a good fit for WordPress.com at this time. See the blue section highlighted in the terms of service.
As Joseph suggests you can contact support if you really want to scrub out out the commercial content.
An export of your content is also just an email away.
If for some reason your support requests have fallen through a crack, you now also have mine and Joseph’s email addresses.
My apologies, we do are best,
Lloyd
That really sucks! I guess I should read the rules. This is good information for our students to know too. It doesn’t matter if they do product reviews for their own site, does it? I liked Scott’s idea to go get the Google Cached files – hopefully that will work.
I really like WordPress if I’m using a host but am somewhat bugged that they limit what you can and can’t do on their free option. Blogger let’s me put affiliate code all over the place. Is this breaking the rules too?
Good luck!
You mean you’re into affiliate marketing and can’t affort hosting for your blog? If you’re serious about your online business, never rely on free services and hire a good webmaster for god’s sake!
😉
Nate, it specifically relates to product reviews for your own site. Their you have a clear commercial interest.
Because our net is bigger it is much easier to manage the spam on WordPress.com than other sites like Blogger, creating a better experience for many.
Further, this approach contributes to the WordPress ecosystem where people with direct business interests can download the exact same software from WordPress.org and run it on almost any paid hosting platform in the world. The WordPress pie is shared by a lot of hosts, designers and developers, continues to result in WordPress growing in interesting ways.
We have our VIP customers which are hand chosen and they are often dealing with challenges serving that much traffic. Here we have expertise.
WordPress.com is focused on providing personal publishing with a community experience.
Everyone,
Thank you for commenting and all the helpful information! Obviously it’s a blog that I don’t maintain actively.
I will remove my affiliate links and see if I can get it back up.
This is a great lesson. The small business owners I coach are normally very low tech. They are also bootstrapping.
I’ll recommend that they use GoDaddy hosting at the level that will support a blog (they seem to be cheapest for a basic host).
I wish there was a way to redirect the entire blog to this one so I don’t lose all the links. It may be some time before I can take care of this.
Janet
Since you are way into teaching people to blog, why not just set up your little blog hosting biz?
It is not that difficult or expensive to do.