It has been almost four days since Google erroneously took down our website, but we’re back on our digital feet, and as we told you through our FaceBook page where many of you stayed in touch with us, and for which, we thank you, we’re ready to make some important changes to the way Carscoop operates.

But first things first. Naturally, you will be wondering why was Carscoop taken down for the second time in 40 days? Well, sites hosted on Google’s Blogger platform are subjected to what the internet giant calls “automated classification system”, which made a false positive marking our site as a spam blog. Here’s Google’s definition of a ‘spam blog’:

“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.”

Wait a second; if Carscoop creates unique content, then why is it targeted by Google Blogger’s ‘robots’? Well, prepare yourself for an answer that will surprise you as much as it surprised us. This is what two Blogger Top Contributors (TCs) told Carscoop:

“The problem, as discussed in that thread, is that your site is appearing as a spam circle because of all of the ripped off content,” said one of the Blogger TCs.

“You spend your time publishing a righteous blog with original content.  The spammers don’t spend their time doing that, all that they have to do is spend their time creating software to clone righteous blogs like yours.  And the spammers are good at doing what they do – they are as good as you are, at doing what you do,” said the other one.

In other words, Carscoop is being penalized by Google and Blogger because other websites are stealing our content and its buggy software can’t tell the difference between the original content creator and the numerous clones. Since Google’s motto is, punish first, ask questions later, our site went down until someone unlocked it.

If you’re wondering whether an internet giant like Google has a customer service department, the answer is no. All it does is direct you to the so-called Google product forums where you first interact with a Blogger Top Contributor, who may or may not push your request to a Blogger Team employee. It could take hours, it could take days. There’s really nothing you can do about it and if you, or someone else participating in the thread annoys the Blogger TC for whatever reason, he or she will undemocratically lock the thread, which happened in our case. Obviously, there’s no such thing as freedom of speech for Google forums. Be warned; the same process applies for, if not all, most Google products (Gmail, Adsense etc.).

Since no one can assure us that this won’t happen again, we’re ready to move on. However, this is not a simple process, as some might like to believe. For example, reader Bobby A. wrote on our Facebook page: “Again. Why the hell can’t you spend $10 USD on a domain?” Without wanting to sound rude, let me ask this: if it was simply a case of spending $10 on a domain name and another $10 for hosting fees, wouldn’t we have done it already? Just think about it for a minute.

The domain name is one thing (even though this has been a huge and costly problem, too), but transferring a website with tens of thousands of posts, hundreds of thousands of pictures and comments, and millions of monthly visitors, is a completely different story, one that has to be carefully studied and planned. At least that’s how I like to work.

Truth is, Carscoop started as a personal hobby back in 2004, with a few random posts every once in a while, before I decided to make it a part-time gig at the end of 2007 and full-time in 2008 after working as an automotive journalist in the print world. Not the best time for any venture due to the financial crisis, but then again, I didn’t have much faith in the print media either…

A lot has changed since then and with the help of you, our readers, and all the editors who worked on Carscoop over the years including Phil Alex, Tristan Hankins, Csaba Daradics, Dan Mihalascu, Andrew Tsaousis and Josh Byrnes, it has grown exponentially becoming one of the most read websites on blogger and dare I say, a fairly popular automotive site with about 1/8th (at least according to what I know – it could be less) of the traffic of Jalopnik. Naturally, we cannot come close to the pageviews nor do we have the same resources as bigger sites like Autoblog.com, but we’re doing our best with what we have.

Personally, I spend a minimum of 17 hours a day on regular weekdays, less on weekends, to keep the site running on a daily basis (be that on the writing or the technical end) and will continue to do so for as long as there’s interest in what we do and write.

As for the immediate future, the first move will be a new domain name, which we will tell you about along with all the other plans we have in the coming days and weeks. That’s a promise. If you would like to share your thoughts on any of the subjects covered here, the comments section is yours.

By John Halas