Learning Circuits - A Spam Blog?

Over the weekend, I heard from Dave Lee that the Learning Circuits Blog - home of the monthly big question - had been labelled a spam blog. Here is Dave's note taken for the side bar:

I'm writing to you through the sidebar because Google has frozen LCB because they believe it is a spam blog.

What's a spam blog? Here's Google's definition:

As with many powerful tools, blogging services can be both used and abused. The ease of creating and updating webpages with Blogger has made it particularly prone to a form of behavior known as link spamming. Blogs engaged in this behavior are called spam blogs, and can be recognized by their irrelevant, repetitive, or nonsensical text, along with a large number of links, usually all pointing to a single site. Spam blogs cause various problems, beyond simply wasting a few seconds of your time when you happen to come across one. They can clog up search engines, making it difficult to find real content on the subjects that interest you. They may scrape content from other sites on the web, using other people's writing to make it look as though they have useful information of their own. And if an automated system is creating spam posts at an extremely high rate, it can impact the speed and quality of the service for other, legitimate users.

So best as i can tell, because The Big Question has been such a great success resulting in a large number of links to and from LCB we are a threat to clog up Google's search engines. I've tried to dissuade the Blog Team from engaging in irrelevant, repetitive, or nonsensical text in their posts. But did they listen to me!!!

Seriously, spam is a very serious issue for any blog platform and we'll have to give Google time to realize that LCB is legit. So for the time being, enjoy the 382 posts from the past two years.

We'll be back up and running with March's Big Question - "Do you really exist if Google says you don't?" as soon as we can.

Dave Lee
your exasperated blogmeister

As the person who originated idea of The Big Question - I feel somewhat responsible for getting Dave into this mess. It also points out how fragile life is in the Web 2.0 world.

I'm not sure what we are going to do with this month's big question. We'll likely wait a few days and see if Google realizes that Learning Circuits really isn't a spam blog.