Umm, ya, ok?, whatever (Part 2)

A friend of mine has a Blogger blog that I’ve been enjoying reading. I thought to myself, randomly, “everybody enjoys web traffic statistics, I wonder if Blogger supports Google Analytics“. Quite a while ago I had a Blogger blog so I dusted off my login and went to see if it is possible.

The blog that I had there was the same as this one which I now host myself using WordPress so, many months ago, I deleted it. I suspect I was probably in a web presence consolidation mood at the time. Today when I tried to recreate that blog at the same location, ahewgill.blogspot.com, I found out it was already taken. No biggie, I’ve experienced issues with persistent data in web services before, so I pointed my browser to the site and was totally surprised by the result. Why is my site all in Japanese? Where did all my posts go? Wait … something seems fishy here.

It seems that a Japanese blogger took over my old URL for what I can only assume is Search Engine Optimization (SEO) reasons. I suspect that they wanted the benefit of the PageRank of the URL and all the links from random search engines around the world. I can’t confirm this of course because there are no markers that would suggest it was true. There is only one external link that goes to another dead blog with no links which wouldn’t help anybody, its all very curious. It just goes to show you that cleaning up your web presence might not always be the best idea. Now I am just biding my time until he deleted his blog to take it back :o).

Note: I didn’t actually link to the URL of my old blog since it would cause a chain reaction of linking in the Blog-o-sphere via the ping-o-matic system that would suggest I promote that persons site, you know … FYI or whatever.