Renaming Your Blog Requires Choosing An Available Blog Name

Like creating a blog, the task of renaming your blog involves one very important step - choosing an available blog name.

When you rename your blog - as in change the blog address - you have to pick a name (address) that's not in use. Both creating a blog, and renaming a blog, suffer from one key detail - you can't identify an available address before you get started.

When you create, or rename, a blog, you can only get to the task at hand, and start with the best choice.

Like "Create a blog", you'll only find out about an available URL after you have successfully chosen that URL for your blog. Unlike "Create a blog", the Blog Address wizard does not verify availability in real time.

1. Paste or type the desired blog name (Only the "yyyyyyy" in "yyyyyyy.blogspot.com").
2. Hit Save.
3. If the name was available, you'll be looking at the initial Blog Address display, with the new address "yyyyyyy.blogspot.com" identified - and "yyyyyyy" will now be unavailable.
4. If the name is not available, you'll get the sad news

   Subdomain: yyyyyyy is not available.

   And now, go back to Step #1, and try again.

If you want to do the rename with the least stress, you make a list of possible choices before you start, and sort the list in decreasing preference. Decide which names you like the most, before you start. Then start the above process with Step #1, and your top choice. If you end at Step #4, pick the next choice in the list, and go to Step #1, again.

As with "Create a blog", you should plan to go through your list as promptly as possible. Hesitate too long, when making the next choice, and your alternate choices could be unavailable.

If your choice of name will affect design work on the existing blog, yet you wish to change the blog design before renaming the blog, setup a stub blog - and pick the best available name for the stub blog, now. Once that's done, make the necessary design changes on your current blog - then swap names between the stub blog and your current blog. You'll likely use the stub blog, later.

As with creating a new blog, please note that addresses previously taken will not be reissued to you by Blogger - a 10 year old blog remains valid, whether published once daily for 10 years, or once 10 years ago and never again.

And as soon as you get the new name successfully chosen, be prepared to continue the renaming process, as promptly as possible.

>> Top

Empty Or New Blogs Are Especially Vulnerable To Spurious Spam Classification

One example of agony, seen all too frequently in Blogger Help Forum: Something Is Broken, comes from new (would be) blog owners.

I setup my new blog, using a great blog name, properly chosen - but before I could post, I got email from Blogger.

Hello, The review of your blog at http://yournewblog.blogspot.com/ confirmed that the content violates the Terms of Service for: SPAM. In accordance with those conditions, the blog has been deleted - and its URL is no longer accessible.

This was a new blog, with no posts! How can it be considered spam??

Unfortunately, this blog owner is the latest victim of the spam problem, and "friendly fire".

If we consider the known lifetime of spam blogs, we can see that new non spam blogs are especially vulnerable to spurious classification as spam hosts.

A spam blog, as methodically published by a spammer, goes through 5 stages of existence, in its lifetime.

• Empty (just published).
• Reserve (previously empty, republished with scraped content added).
• Active (previously reserve, republished with payload added).
• Detected (previously active, locked by the Blogger Spam Classification bot).
• Deleted.

Unfortunately, an Empty spam blog is remarkably similar to an Empty non spam blog (even one with a great, properly chosen name) - depending upon various other details. This leaves some new non spam blogs looking like spam blogs - and subjects them to spurious classification as spam blog.

As the Blogger Spam Classifier examines each new blog, it sees an empty blog. The presence of similar empty blogs, recently examined, may make any new, non spam blog look like another member of the latest spam blog cluster.

It's possible that, the longer a blog remains empty (with no published posts), the more likely it is to be spuriously classified. Personally, as soon as I create a new blog, the first thing that I do is to publish a post with some minimal content. Maybe that's what everybody should be doing.

Welcome to my new blog.

or alternately, the well known Lorem ipsum.

>> Top