Google has measures in place to ensure that legitimate blogs can't get mistakenly taken offline as spam, but they're apparently not enough to prevent certain Blogger sites from being caught in the crossfire. The recent plight of one blogger who had his blog unceremoniously removed after being reported for spam has brought this issue to light, though Google promises that further measures are about to be in place that will help mitigate it.

Blogger user John Hempton wrote an essay on January 2 about Astarra Strategic Fund, a fund management group that Hempton believes is fraudulent. In the post, he explained how Astarra fits into the Australian privatized social security system, noting that he sent a letter to authorities to voice his concerns that eventually got him into the newspapers. One day later, Hempton's entire blog was no longer available on Blogger, with a note on his end from Google saying that the "spam prevention robots" had detected his blog as spam.

The story was brought to light by a Reuters blog post, which noted that it was likely that Hempton's blog was flagged as spam by readers (and, if you like to fan the conspiracy theory flames, probably by astroturfers for Astarra). Google responded by saying that there are a "number of protections" in place to prevent such a situation, but they apparently failed. "Generally speaking, there were a number of indicators for John’s blog that should have very easily avoided any false positive spam classification—and I’m trying to find out how/why those got bypassed," Google spokesperson Rick Klau wrote.

This isn't the first time such a thing has happened for apparently the same reasons, however; it certainly seems as if it's too easy to take blogs down for spam with no easy recourse for legit Blogger users. Under the current system, those who seek reinstatement must submit a form request through Google and then... wait. In a way, the situation reminds us of those who are victims of bogus YouTube takedowns. It's too easy for nearly anyone to send a takedown over a video and have it removed before any human gets to evaluate the situation properly—a scenario that several prominent copyright activists have found themselves in the middle of.

Google noted in its response, however, that it's considering new measures for real bloggers who get accidentally caught in the spam net, such as a reCAPTCHA that Google plans to incorporate into Blogger in the first quarter of this year. This will certainly help, but in the meantime, there's not much else affected bloggers can do besides playing the waiting game.