Word Press Ban Blogs

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By TheAntiHype | February 5, 2008

Is that a hyped-up headline?

I’d say “no”. I’d say that is a good headline. It is factually correct and attracts attention.

Hopefully it doesn’t apply to you. It refers to the other type of WordPress blog – you know the type that are hosted by WordPress with the style yoursite.wordpress.com These are exactly the type of sites I refer to as “free hosted” and where you can run into trouble. Read on…

Yesterday I posted a whole series of videos that take a beginner from Buying a Domain & Choosing a Web Host, through installing WordPress to setting up RSS and writing the first post.

The videos are provided by Yaro Starak and are of very high quality and are easy to follow.

The first video is all about “Why WordPress”.

I commented about the possible disappearance of a “free hosted” blog and the loss of all of your hard work.

Co-incidentally I received an email last night that touched on this very subject. The email refers to the WordPress hosted service (DO NOT CONFUSE THIS WITH WordPress THAT YOU INSTALL ON YOUR OWN SERVER / HOSTED SERVER – which are NOT affected at all) and highlights some reasons why your blog could be in breach of their rules.

If you were in breach, who knows what action would be taken but you could certainly fear the sudden banning of the site and consequent loss of everything.

This, in my opinion is one of THE major reasons why you should use WordPress on your own domain and not rely on a free hosted service.

Here’s the extract from the WordPress Terms of Business (remember this IS NOT a self hosted WordPress blog but one hosted by WordPress)

Types of Unacceptable Blogs:
http://wordpress.com/types-of-blogs/

And here are some examples of blogs that are banned from WordPress.com (all of these fall under the general heading of “spam blogs”, or splogs, and we will be deleted as soon as we find them or they get reported to us):

Scraper blogs: Blogs that take content from other blogs and re-publish it without permission (this is sometimes called scraping). If a blog contains all or mostly stolen and unoriginal content, it’s gone!

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 highly. WordPress.com is not meant for this type of activity.

Affiliate marketing blogs: Blogs with the primary purpose of driving traffic to affiliate programs. To be clear, examples like people writing original book or movie reviews and linking them to Amazon, or people linking to their own products on Etsy do NOT fall into this category. We’re only talking about blogs that are primarily designed to promote different affiliate programs.