BlogRush, You’re Kidding Me

BlogRush Facebook FlyerLast month, I wrote a piece saying that BlogRush was a waste of time and that nobody should invest in the service. I signed up (to see what it was all about) and never bothered installing the widget given that I’ve had experience with “traffic generating widgets” before, and they’ve been anything but positive.

Today, much to my surprise, I received an email from the BlogRush team stating that “We regret to inform you that your BlogRush Account has been made INACTIVE because your blog did not pass our Quality Review criteria.” Their “strict quality guidelines” are outlined below:

– The blog contains unique, quality content that provides opinions, insights, and/or recommended resources that provide value to readers of the blog. Articles, videos, public domain works, press releases, and content written by others are okay to be used on the blog, but the ratio of unique content should far outweigh content from other sources.

– The blog should be updated on a regular basis (at least several times a month) and should not just go a few months between posts.

– The blog should already contain at least 10-12 quality posts. New blogs with very little content will not be accepted.

– The blog’s primary contain must be in English. BlogRush is currently not available for non-English blogs.

– The blog should not contain an excessive amount of advertising and links and very little actual content. The focus of the blog should be quality content.

– The primary content of the blog should not be “scraped” content from other sources and/or script-generated pages for the sole purpose of search engine rank manipulation. The focus of the blog should be quality content.

– The blog’s content (or advertising) should not contain any of the following types of content: hate, anti-racial, terrorism, drug-related, hacking, phishing, fraud, pornographic, nudity, warez, gambling, copyright infringement, obscene or disgusting material of any kind, or anything considered illegal.

Can someone tell me where I’ve gone wrong here? I assume that BlogRush does not want to be affiliated with sites that speak negatively of the program, which of course, I did. (What else is new? ๐Ÿ™‚ ) I’d be interested to see if others have suffered the same fate. Honestly, it’s not a loss to me, but I suppose you all should steer clear of offending the BlogRush review squad because you, too, may get deactivated from their program.

I’ve gone one step further to apply a wildcard filter for widget.blogrush.com* using AdBlock on Firefox (even though I don’t really see BlogRush widgets anyway).

On that note, for those of you who are using BlogRush, are you getting traffic? Andy didn’t like it and it looks like Darren removed the widget from his site after his CTR report as well. So, bloggers, was it worth the hype?

Update: I don’t know why I didn’t think of it (maybe because I wrote this post at 1:15AM), but I just linked to Facebook Flyer advertising the BlogRush program that I found on Facebook yesterday.

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55 replies on “BlogRush, You’re Kidding Me”
  1. I think a ban from Blogrush may be a badge of quality as I note some the quality of some of the blogs that run it. In fact, when I see a blog with the blogrush widget my opinion of the blogger takes a tumble.

  2. Thanks for posting this Tamar. I just got an “Inactive” email from Blogrush and was both suprised and extremely annoyed. They claimed my content was “not unique enough”. I was about to post something about it but found you had beaten me to the punch.

    I don’t think this has anything to do with going negative on them. I never bashed them – all I did was promote their service to my readers by placing it on every page of my blog. And this is the thanks I get?

    I am not sure what’s going on at Blogrush HQ but I don’t think the “piss off bloggers” strategy is the way to become an integral part of the blogosphere.

    – Andrew

  3. says: Simonne

    I also didn’t write anything about them, neither good not bad. I had their widget installed for about one week, then I removed it and I forgot about it at all. Those guys failed and they want people to remember them. If your blog is not good and original, then I’m a dead monkey!

  4. says: Reny

    Yup, my account was made inactive as well. The reason same as above, “not unique enough???. Not once had I blogged about Blogrush, I just installed the widget. It is really no lost. I did not see an increase in traffic as well.

    I agree, Blogrush might be burning its own bridges with its poor excuses. Guess they got what they really wanted – backlinks and free advertisements.

  5. says: Sebastian

    I got this email yesterday. I ran a post “avoid BlogRush like the plague” and placed the widget only on a links page with a disclaimer. As for traffic, there was next to zilch from literally tons of owed impressions I’ve earned whilst I had the widget on all pages for a few days. IOW: the blogrush experiment turned into miserable failure.

  6. says: B carter

    I received the same email this morning. My blog was fairly new, but if they think I’m going to come crawling back to ask for reinstatement, they’re off their rocker.

    Brenda

  7. says: John Reese

    Tamar,

    John Reese from BlogRush here.

    You definitely have a quality blog that meets our criteria. I believe the reviewer that reviewed your blog did not approve your blog because you never added the widget to it; that’s the only thing I can think of as I see no other reason.

    We certainly don’t have anything against anyone that posts any criticism about our service — because that’s the only way we’ll make it better. So that’s definitely not the reason your account was made inactive.

    Best Regards,

    John Reese

  8. Tamar – I didn’t even bother signing up with it in the first place. It sounded way to good to be true at the time, and I haven’t heard many positive reports about BlogRush generating oodles of traffic either. Not even from the so-called top teir bloggers who were supposed to benefit most.

    Did they really think people were going to place their widget prominently instead of their AdSense blocks?

  9. says: DazzlinDonna

    Ok, let me play the devil’s advocate here. Perhaps the fact that you never installed the widget triggered some kind of auto-ban. Seems reasonable to me, anyway. Just a thought…

  10. says: Jason Falls

    Wow, T. If yours didn’t pass quality standards they clearly have the wrong standards in place. My assumption was they weeded out the link-a-palooza blogs and gratuitous attempts at getting money with no substantive content. Guess I was wrong.

    If it makes you feel any better, I’ve had the Blogrush widget on my site for a month or so now and have yet to see any measurable traffic incoming from their servers. Nice idea … no execution so far.

  11. Donna: that’s fair and understandable, but is that listed within their “Quality Guidelines?” I’d totally understand that concern if that was one of the bulleted items, but it was not.

    FWIW, it doesn’t seem that I’m the only one who got deactivated, and some of these users never removed the widget.

  12. John: I just de-spammed your comment from Akismet. That makes sense, but why isn’t that one of the criteria under the quality guidelines? The recipient of the email is left to wonder what quality standards they don’t meet without mention of the widget itself.

    The email, as you know, said “We regret to inform you that your BlogRush Account has been made INACTIVE because your blog did not pass our Quality Review criteria. You will find instructions below for making your account active again.

    You will notice that the widget no longer loads on your pages — please remove the BlogRush code from your blog for now.”

    The text implies that every recipient of the email is still using the widget.

  13. Seems to be an epidemic. I got tons of posts like yours in my feed reader. Anyhow, your initial feeling is usually the right one. Also think about it for a second. Do you remember banner exchange networks? Do you know what they are doing now? Remember how they worked? Remember why they worked for a brief period of time and then just sucked and then only tried to get clueless newbies to spend money on them for credz etc.? Mhhh..I will say no more.

  14. says: Marty

    I agree with Andrew. It’s a badge of quality to be banned from BR and has more PR value. You don’t need it for traffic anyway!

  15. Heh, I got an email telling me how the quality had improved because they kicked out 10k ‘bad’ blogs, and that my blog had passed their quality checks. I’d actually meant to take the widget off my site a long time ago, but forgot all about it, so now that they’ve reminded me the widget is gone. I didn’t see any traffic from it.

  16. says: Tom Staley

    Its funny I should run across this blog, because this morning I also received the email 10/22/2007. Now I don’t mention Blogroll anywhere on my site. But WordPress won’t allow java inserts anyway.

  17. says: Bill

    I was emailed that my blog had passed their quality guidelines.

    I never quite got to the point of installing the widget on my blog either.

  18. Bill, interesting. I guess they have a lot of people on their quality review squad who apparently don’t collaborate or agree on what defines quality.

    Oh well, no loss. ๐Ÿ™‚

  19. says: chipseo

    So exactly WHO are the blogs that ARE still accepted? I do see the widget every once in a while, but not on any blogs I frequent all that much? I was going to try it out but I am glad I didn’t waste my time with it at this point. I would like to know who is left.

    Would LOVE to know what kind of business plan they have for everything going forward since they are systematically killing their own business. At this rate you would think they would turn their service into a paid subscription or something, not sure how else they are going to make money with it.

    Love the adblock plug ๐Ÿ™‚

    Scott

  20. says: Cindy

    This was my response to being DEACTIVATED:
    “Making my BlogRush account INACTIVE for unspecified reasons of your own sounds SO “GOOGLE LIKE”…yet another internet god is born! Not a great way to make friends and influence people…”
    Oh well…no big loss!

  21. Tamar,

    Don’t feel bad. You’re in good company. They also banned One Man’s Blog because you know, I’m so damned controversial. ๐Ÿ™‚

    I also think it’s nice how when you log in to BlogRush now you are not even presented with any means of contact to discuss the situation. Not that I’ll be re-installing it anyway mind you.

    John P.

  22. says: Steve

    My account was also de-activated (not enough posts I guess), I haven’t read about anyone that actually received much traffic from BlogRush. It should be called BlogTrickle.

  23. says: Teli Adlam

    I wrote about the BlogRush quality problem a while ago, which was addressed not too shortly after I hit “Publish” with the implementation of manual blog reviews.

    Seeing that your blog was declined for not adding the widget with only a passing reference to their quality guidelines*, and then seeing Scott’s blog being accepted despite not adding the widget does not instill much hope.

    I’ve been watching my stats because I do want the service to succeed, but the net traffic gain from the service doesn’t justify the widget right now; I’ve actually been meaning to pull it. Even with the new designer widgets, credit balancing system and title optimization tips, the improvement is minimal and uninspiring.

    Essentially, a better system (especially for communication) needs to be put in place for BlogRush to regain some of the confidence it lost with all of its growing pains. Frankly, I’m well aware of the “just launch it” philosophy, but these are all things that should have been considered before the service launched. Slapping a “Beta” sticker on a website only works (well) if you’re Google. ๐Ÿ™‚

    Just my 2 cents.

    ~ Teli

    *

    The blog’s primary contain must be in English.

    The proofreader’s primary language should be English.

  24. says: doug m

    i have had the widget up for a bit to see if it would drive traffic to my blog since it is fairly new and i need traffic :), but i haven’t seen any incoming clicks from it regardless of how many credits i have. the credits keep flucuating and i can’t really tell how many i have but i haven’t seen any boost in traffic.

  25. I removed the widget a couple of weeks ago in the midst of all the “shocking” changes stuff that was being announced. I just got fed up of waiting and no matter how hard I tried I couldn’t like the widget in any “flavor”. It just looked untidy and was bringing very little quality traffic in any case. Most visitors stayed less than 30 seconds.

    Strangely enough I haven’t been kicked out of the program, but I don’t think it will be making a return. I was very surprised to see some of the blogs deemed unfit to participate, and it made me wonder who the reviewers are and just how much they know about blogging or how to evaluate them.

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  27. Quote from John Reese:
    “We certainly don’t have anything against anyone that posts any criticism about our service — because that’s the only way we’ll make it better.”

    That’s funny because John Reese tried to sue me for giving a poor review of his Traffic Secrets home study course. Maybe things are different now.

  28. says: Matt Keegan

    BlogRush is overblown. I got suspicious of it when all of these Sphinn posts appeared giving it a positive spin — I couldn’t see how it could possibly receive such good press, being so new.

    You have confirmed my suspicions!

  29. I got banned pretty quick, probably because my blogs are new and did not have 10 posts yet. No problem with that.

    The problem is there is no way on the blogrush site to request re-evaluation and they don’t answer emails.

  30. says: LC

    I finally removed my BR widget yesterday. The idea and algo are good in theory, but due to our specialty nature our site had little contextual matching with the category topic contents. Once he gains a true enterprise critical mass, I’d look at it again.

  31. says: Dave Scott

    Tried BlogRush. Horrible traffic generation. Haven’t been able to log in to my account there for over a week. Their support has not gotten back to me since I reported it a week ago. I took the widget out and wont be using them again.

    — Dave

  32. says: Rob

    Was willing to try this thing out but it wouldn’t even install, instead leaving a big blank section with a small BR image at its center. Admin have taken way too long to answer my queries so I began more research on the widget. Turns out it is not that popular anywhere so I don’t want to be a part of it.

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