Starting on August 4, 2026, an unprecedented wave hit Blogger (Blogspot): countless blogs around the world were suddenly restricted overnight for allegedly violating Google's "Malware and Similar Malicious Content" policy. According to discussions in the Google community, this appears to have been caused by a glitch in Google's automated security system, which wrongly flagged perfectly legitimate content as malicious — a classic case of false positives.
If a Blogger blog you manage has been deleted or blocked and you can no longer access it, start by submitting a review request, and be sure to back up your blog's data through Google Takeout. Even if your blog hasn't been affected by this particular incident, it's still a good habit to download backups of your Blogspot blog regularly and keep them somewhere safe. Once you have a backup, you'll be able to move your content over to WordPress.
Google Blogger's Mass Blocking Incident
On August 4 and 5, 2026, a large number of Blogspot blogs were taken down for supposedly violating Google's policy against malware and similar malicious content.
Visiting one of the affected blogs brought up an error message along these lines: "Blog has been removed. Sorry, the blog at example.blogspot.com has been removed. This address is not available for use on a new blog."
A Diamond Product Expert in the Google community weighed in on the issue in a thread posted on August 4, 2026, discussing the false positives tied to the malware policy. Per that thread, the trouble appears to stem from Google's automated security system misclassifying ordinary, harmless blogs as malicious sites. The issue has reportedly already been escalated to the team at Google, and a fix is said to be in the works.
Update: A good number of the blogs that were blocked in this incident now appear to be gradually coming back online. That said, some of them have been blocked all over again after being flagged through reports from other users — and in at least some cases, those reports look like they were filed in bad faith rather than for any genuine policy violation. This back-and-forth seems to have left many bloggers with noticeably less confidence in the Blogger platform than they had before.
What to Do If Your Blog Gets Blocked or Deleted
Requesting a Review
When your blog has been blocked, logging into Blogspot will show a warning that says "this blog has been blocked." If that happens, click the Info tab on the left-hand side to submit a review request.
It looks like the Info tab only shows up once a blog has actually been blocked.
A pop-up will appear explaining that the blog was removed for violating Blogger's community guidelines, that it will be permanently deleted within a certain number of days, and that you can click the Request Review button to ask for a review. Click that button to submit your request. (It seems the blog is permanently deleted around 90 days after the violation notice is issued.)
Backing Up Your Data
Backing up your Blogspot data means that even if your blog ends up being permanently deleted, you'll still be able to take that data and move it over to WordPress.
Blogspot, like any free platform, operates under the terms set by its provider — which means your blog can be deleted or blocked at any time, even if you've done nothing wrong. If you run a Blogspot blog, it's a smart habit to back up your data regularly and store it somewhere safe.
You can back up your Google Blogger data through Google Takeout.
Clicking "Next step" in the screen above takes you to the section where you choose the file format, frequency, and destination.
Here you can set the export frequency, file format, file size, and so on. Click Create export to kick off the backup, and you'll get a notification email once it's ready.
When the email notification arrives, click "Manage your Google Takeout request."
Data from every blog under that Google account gets backed up together.
Click the Download button to save your backup to your PC or wherever you keep it. There's a time limit on how long the download link stays active, so make sure to grab it before it expires.😄
Once you're holding onto a backup, you can move your Blogspot posts over to WordPress whenever you're ready. The basics of that process are laid out below.
Setting Up WordPress and Migrating Your Blogger Content
Sign Up for Hosting and Install WordPress
WordPress comes in two forms: the hosted version at WordPress.com, and the self-hosted version, where you install WordPress on your own web hosting account. When people say "WordPress," they're almost always talking about the self-hosted version — if you want to dig into the difference, our article "Two Kinds of WordPress: Hosted vs. Self-Hosted" walks through it.
There's no shortage of hosting providers to pick from. If you're just getting your blog off the ground, an affordable host will do the job — FastComet and ChemiCloud are both solid, budget-friendly options among overseas providers. ChemiCloud in particular runs a Seoul server region, so it tends to load noticeably faster for visitors in Korea.
If you expect heavier traffic or plan to run more than one WordPress site, a cloud VPS host like Cloudways — which this blog itself runs on — is worth a look. As mentioned above, the promo code WPCAFE20 gets you 20% off for your first three months, up to 60% in total savings.
Best Cloudways Promo Codes for Up to 60% Off Your Plan
These days, most hosts install WordPress automatically the moment you sign up. With FastComet or ChemiCloud, you can also install it yourself through cPanel.
Importing Your Blogger Data
WordPress used to ship with a built-in Blogger import tool, but it no longer works — Blogger backups are now generated in a different format than the tool expects. The workaround is a free plugin called Feed Importer for Blogger.
- From your WordPress dashboard, go to Plugins > Add New, search for "Feed Importer for Blogger," and install it.
- Once it's installed and activated, head to Tools > Blogger Importer.
- On the screen that appears, select the atom-format file under "Blogger Export File" and upload it. If your Blogger backup downloaded as a zip file, unzip it first — you'll find a feed.atom file containing your Blogger post data inside the relevant blog's folder under Takeout > Blogger > Blogs.
- Once the import finishes, check Posts > All Posts to confirm everything came through. Images get pulled in along with your posts and pages, so if you have a lot of them, the import can take a while.
If your backup file is large, the import can sometimes fail outright. If that happens, try raising your PHP settings — the memory limit in particular — and run the import again.
On Cloudways, try setting the PHP memory limit to 512M or 1024M and bumping the execution limit up to somewhere around 600–800, then test the import again.
If you're on FastComet or ChemiCloud, you can raise your PHP settings in much the same way. Our article on troubleshooting failed restores with the All-in-One WP Migration plugin on FastComet and ChemiCloud covers comparable steps, and the same fixes apply here.
Once the import is done, you can remove the Blogger importer plugin — just go to Plugins > Installed Plugins and delete it.
Connecting Your Domain
If you were using a custom domain with Blogger, you can add that same domain to your new WordPress site and connect it there.
How you connect it depends on where you're hosting:
- On Cloudways, delete any CNAME records you'd set up for Blogger and set up an A record in their place (see our article on what to check when connecting a domain on Cloudways).
- On FastComet or ChemiCloud, you can point the domain to your site by updating its nameservers (see "ChemiCloud: Installing Multiple WordPress Sites").
Keep in mind that once you change a domain's nameservers, it can take a day or two for the DNS changes to fully propagate.
Wrapping Up
That covers what to do if your Blogspot blog gets blocked or deleted. Google has acknowledged the issue, so it's likely to be resolved before too long — and indeed, plenty of blogs are already being restored. Still, the fact that some of them have been re-blocked afterward, apparently due to reports from other users, has understandably shaken a lot of bloggers' trust in the platform.
Blogspot is free to use, but because it runs entirely on Google's infrastructure and is bound by Google's terms of service, incidents like this one can happen again at any time.
If you'd rather not be at the mercy of a platform and want full freedom to run your own site, WordPress is the way to go — and it holds a real edge when it comes to SEO in particular.
With tools like ChatGPT and Gemini making it easier than ever to churn out content, free blogging platforms have seen a surge in abuse, and platform operators are now scrambling to filter out AI-generated spam. Unfortunately, that aggressive filtering has also swept up plenty of innocent, legitimate bloggers along the way.😥
