I guess most of us got the mail about a new policy Google is enforcing for adult content bloggers, if not, here it is:
Important Update to Adult Content Policy on Blogger
You are receiving this message because you are the admin of a blog hosted on Blogger which is identified to have Adult content.
Please be advised that on June 30th 2013, we will be updating our Content Policy to strictly prohibit the monetization of Adult content on Blogger. After June 30th 2013, we will be enforcing this policy and will remove blogs which are adult in nature and are displaying advertisements to adult websites.
If your adult blog currently has advertisements which are adult in nature, you should remove them as soon as possible as to avoid any potential Terms of Service violation and/or content removals.
Sincerely,
The Blogger Team
So basically you have to remove any ads/banners/whatever that link to "adult websites". I'm a little pissed off about this, more restrictions are hardly ever a good thing, but at the same time, I've seen "blogs" that are really nothing more but walls of ads to sex sites and shops. This new policy is probably mostly to counter those people, but since this is Google they'll probably use the big broom and delete every blog that even has the smallest hint of ads/monetization. On the other hand, their turf, their rules, if you don't like it, there are always other options.
Related to this, a friendly reminder, you can back-up your blog and save all your entries and comments. On the main blogger page, go to settings - other, and under blogger tools you can see "export blog", click on that and then download. The file will be saved as an XML file, so it's easy to import it to another site or blogging service. I recommend doing a back-up regularly anyway.
Regular updating will resume shortly!
I got this too but I don't think it affects blogs like ours. It only affects blogs with links to sites with monetary elements about them. I agree, it's a bad ruling because it means we can't link to sites that sell gay stuff, toys, etc., but I personally won't be do anything with my blog. I'm not removing any links. I'll wait and see what happens. My blog is only small, lets see what they do.
ReplyDeleteIt shouldn't affect blogs like ours, that's true. I also think this is more about ads and banners that are on a blog to make money, and that we can still link to adult shops in our actual blog entries, as long as we don't make any money out of it.
DeleteI won't change anything on my blog either. Still, better to be safe than sorry, and make a back-up in any case. But this definitely affects a few blogs I follow, so I hope everyone makes some changes, or move their blog to another site. In the last few months I've been thinking of moving to Wordpress myself... we'll see what happens.
Sent you an email earlier where I talked about this. But I agree with what you said here and I'm going to backup my blog just in case...
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