I recently started using a service called HideMyAss. In a nutshell, it hides my ip address as I work on my computer. That means my browsing is hidden, but it also means when I use link building software my real ip is not recorded either. That ‘s the reason I signed up for it.
I have a couple of link building applications that call for proxies to keep you out of trouble as you create and post to accounts. Now, I don’t quite get what proxies are, or what kind I should subscribe to. There are free ones available all over the place and I even have a really inexpensive proxy scraper. But the only time I tried to use it, it turned out the proxies were worthless.
With paid proxies, also available all over the place, there are anonymous proxies and private proxies and green proxies, etc., etc. And I have no clue what any of that means.
So instead of trying to figure out what all the proxy stuff means, I thought I’d go for HideMyAss which just hides everything. And I like it. It has worked well when creating accounts and posting to web 2.0 sites for backlinks.
There is a caveat, of course. When using HideMyAss, it is not a good idea to access websites that are password protected, like your bank or Paypal. Makes sense. You don’t want them to think someone is trying to hack into your account and freeze it or shut it down. But Google?
Well, I was using HideMyAss the other day and didn’t remember I had it running. I finished up my backlinking tasks and continued to do my other work. Apparently I signed into Gmail during that time to check for mail. A few hours later, once HYA was turned off, I attempted to go back into Gmail and my Google account had been disabled. Damn!
That also meant I couldn’t access my Adsense, Adwords, Reader, or YouTube accounts either. Not good. Analytics was still available.
I did a bunch of searching for what I could do get my Google account re-enabled. Google does not make it easy to weed through the information on their website, nor do they make it easy to find. I finally came upon a way to alert Google to send an email to my back up email address for verification that I am me and nobody hacked my account. (Not sure I could retrace how I did that…)
Ultimately I was able to change my Google account password and I could access all my disable accounts. Except YouTube. That one is much more elusive. It is still listed as suspended. Did I really violate some term of service that caused my account to be suspended? (Absolutely nothing that I am aware of.) Or is this suspension just a remnant of the original disabling? That they happened at the very same time makes me think they are related.
I have filled out the little form that YouTube provides for people who have a question about the suspension of their accounts. Haven’t heard anything back. Some people get their accounts reinstated. Some people never hear back from YouTube. Which will be the case for me?
Another option is to post in the support forum. I’ll give it a few more days and see what happens.
Losing my YouTube account is not the end of the world. It did force me to figure out an alternative for posting some videos on my sites. I have now converted a bunch of videos from MP3 to FLV, uploaded them to Amazon S3, and am displaying them on my blogs using a plugin. That works fine and takes them out of Google’s hands.
It still bugs me though. I would prefer to have the option to upload videos to YouTube if I want.
If anyone has any ideas on steps I can take to get reinstated with YouTube, I’d appreciate hearing them. Thanks a bunch.
