For those in the making money online game, this has been an eventful couple of weeks with the Google Blogger team disabling the number one “Make Money Online” blog, http://moneymakerinfo.blogspot.com/,  then mysteriously re-enabling it about one week later.

This has caused waves throughout the making money online industry for a couple reasons:  (1)  There are many who thought that having a Blogger blog was as good, if not better, than having your own domain.  And (2), it appears that Google is cracking down on stereotypical making money online blogs, or MFA (Made for AdSense) sites and especially those who use a few dirty little secrets to attract buyers.

Let’s first look at the site.  According to his about page, The Money Maker Info blog is owned by a gentlemen of 32 named Alan Liew.  Alan had achieved Google top results, often number one, for many making money search terms including the granddaddy of them all “make money online”.  By all estimates, this favored positioning earned him between $50 and $100k annually if not more.

Then, a little over a week ago, Google simply cancelled the blog sending Mr. Liew a message saying that his blog was a “spam” blog.  Just like that.  All income gone.

There was an Internet outcry over this.  You can view this Warrior Forum Thread where one user echoes the sentiments of many:

Wow, this is a HUGe HUGE Shock. Alan’s Site www.moneymakerinfo.blogspot.com is over 4 years old and has been number one for hundreds of huge Keywords including ‘make money online’.

This goes to show (as I have been saying myself) that you need to Host your Own Domain and if you use the Blogger interface to back ALL your content up. There is no excuse as use can automatically do this with Blogger.

That being said I am speechless about this as I have come to love Alan’s Blog. But it got flagged for Spam.

Even bloggers who were doing everything that they could to overtake Alan Liew in the search engines cried foul with this one.  Why?  Well, the reasons given were simply not true…it is not a spam blog.  It seemed to be a gross overstepping of bounds by Google and an indication that they are truly embracing a big brother type of mentality.

When Google labels a blog a spam blog, the chance of having it re-instated are normally virtually nil.  However, in this case, about 5 days after the disabling of the account, the account was re-enabled with very few words from Alan himself.  Since Google owns AdSense, and the Blogger platform, people seem too fearful to talk about any of this.  I would genuinely like to know why the blog was first cancelled and then renabled, but we’ll never know because nobody will talk.  Personally, I like to think that Google listened to the folks out there negatively commenting on this and took the appropriate action.  But, again, we’ll just never know.

Many people take this as proof that you should never rely on a Blogger blog because it can be cancelled at Google’s sole discretion.  Rather, you should always have your own domain name so that you are not subject to the whims and limitations of another company.

Another very popular making money blog, Making Money Online for Beginners, which is also hosted on the Blogger platform, has received similar condemnation from Google.  In the article Making Money Online in 2010, the author Griz makes note of the fact that Google seems determined to hit those with a penalty who write about making money online and do it too well.  He silently but conspicuously removed AdSense from his pages, from which he was reportedly earning a few thousand a month, after several emails received from the big boys.

Finally, in another article that references these two blogs, the author writes about How to Not Make Money Online after Google de-indexed all of his sites and basically turned his $100 a day profits into nothing as his sites were too much Made for AdSense.

Is Google right in doing what they have done or are they turning into the feared big brother?

The answer lies somewhere in between.

Many people create websites simply to make money from AdSense and they do not provide real value to the visitor.  Since your place in the search engines is dictated by quality and quantity of links, these people get themselves to the top of Google by creating quality and quantity links…themselves.  This is not really what Google would call natural and Google would be justified in removing these sites.

However, I would add that each of the websites cited in this article, while probably engaged in significant self-promotion, are all sites that do provide value about their respective topics.  I have fairly consistently read them all and each provides significant content worthy of their Google positioning.

There are two things that you can take away from what happened to Alan’s site and these others.

One, if you are starting from scratch and want to create a serious blog, do not go with a Blogger blog or any other freebie that subjects you to the whims of others.

And two, if you make money from Google AdSense and talk about, you best not talk about how you manipulated the system to do it.  If you do, you’re gone.