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10,000+ Blogs Being Removed From BlogRush | ||
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We’ve finally completed our massive “quality-control audit” of our entire network… By the end of this weekend, over 10,000 blogs will be removed from the BlogRush network for not meeting our quality guidelines and criteria. We’ve begun the removal process and it will take about 3 days to complete. By Monday, BlogRush members should no longer see spammy, non-English, or poor quality blogs appearing in their widget. We took a lot of heat about the initial spam and abuse that our network suffered, and many said we wouldn’t be able to stop it. Well, they were wrong. Every blog in our network will have been manually reviewed (now and in the future) and we will uphold strict quality guidelines. These guidelines can be viewed in our updated Terms Of Service agreement. We’ll post more news about all of this by Monday, and include information for those that might have their accounts deactivated; including how to resubmit a blog for review and/or make changes to meet our guidelines. As I have previously stated more than once, we will not rest until our service provides tremendous value for our members and helps drive a long-term, steady stream of new readers to their blogs. Have A Great Weekend!
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October 19th, 2007 at 11:53 pm
Good work. Hopefully things go according to plan this time around.
October 20th, 2007 at 12:21 am
oh yeah baby that’s the stuff
October 20th, 2007 at 1:12 am
Yay! That xanga blog that I can’t use can finally be purged.
(How about a delete feature in an upcoming update?) Thanks!
October 20th, 2007 at 1:18 am
Meg - it’s on the way!
October 20th, 2007 at 2:16 am
That are a lot of blogs! how much left?
October 20th, 2007 at 2:56 am
I just signed up to BlogRush (I picked chocolate flava which is just fit to my blog col). AND fortunately my blog is aprroved. I am so happy
and keep following the 2nd phase update of BlogRush. think i put the great widget on the right place already. Not on top of my blog, but it’s just obviously visible for the reader. Thanks 
October 20th, 2007 at 7:01 am
I have a log of blogs but the widget will not fit in the sidebar. Any chance of getting this soon?
Thanks.
October 20th, 2007 at 9:46 am
Jean, a smaller widget is supposed to be coming soon. See this post…
http://www.income.com/blog/2007/10/09/phase-2-feedback/
October 20th, 2007 at 1:33 pm
Good luck with the changes. I’m still experiencing the same trickle of visitors via the widget, which I am very happy to receive. Hopefully that number will increase after this weekend.
October 20th, 2007 at 2:49 pm
I still don’t see any traffic on my site meter coming from Blog Rush… Is that how it shows up - as “BlogRush”. And I still don’t ever see my blog listed on other people’s blogs.
Am I doing something wrong in terms of getting my blog out there?
Just wondering.
Blessings,
Karla
October 20th, 2007 at 5:27 pm
Well I hope I am not one of them as I need the traffic. Do we get notified if we are being removed?
October 20th, 2007 at 6:13 pm
Dear John,
I’m new to the blogging scene and keen to attract traffic to Reverse Turkey through your tool (fingers crossed). I’ve looked around a number of the sites that use your tool and notice that they bury BlogRush deep in their site. I thought this was against the principles of this free tool?
Regards
R.Turkey
October 20th, 2007 at 7:58 pm
Good news. But John, when will Income.com be launching!!
October 20th, 2007 at 9:36 pm
Karla,
The incoming BlogRush traffic to your site when you are looking at site statistics starts with widget.blogrush.com/…..
October 20th, 2007 at 11:14 pm
Just amazing John!
You just keep re-proving that you are one of the greats. You keep showing and reminding us that Internet marketing isn’t all about making money quick and easy… it’s about treating your customers, visitors, partners, and everything with respect and giving as much value as you can.
Thanks for going way beyond the call to make your products the best they can!
Joel Osborne
btw.. Thanks for the upcoming “Delete” feature
October 21st, 2007 at 1:12 am
When I entered my sites I made a Mistake ’cause I didn’t understand how it worked, and one of my blogs appears 5 times in my GetCode page.
Could this be bad?
I thought they were going to be removed too.
October 21st, 2007 at 5:14 am
Adding to the widget placement conversation, I think that quality widgets deserve higher placement. Enhancing BlogRush with quality control measures should improve results. Kudos to John and the BlogRush team for their efforts.
How about this: In the spirit of cooperation, I propose that all of us enthusiastic BlogRush users bump up our widget to a higher position. Let’s give John a chance to prove his point about placement.
I’m thinking if you get two hits for every one you give away, that’s good business. Maybe that’s an over-simplification and perhaps John can reiterate the potential benefits of higher placement for new BlogRush users coming on board.
October 21st, 2007 at 8:37 am
From Yesterday
Have fun you guys. With 56 people in my network and only 3 visitors per day through BR, I cannot justify taking up potentially income earning real estate with a widget that gives people a new way to leave the site. If I were getting a few hundred visitors per day from other BR widgets, sure! But 3?
Great idea (possibly), poor planning and even worse execution. When you have promised people a certain level of expectation (ie, visitor flow, revamped dashboard by a certain time, page for page impressions…) you have to live up to it. When you don’t, that’s fine, but a once a week update does not suffice. As other people have noted here, it seems as though John Reese is the only person working on this, rather than a team of crack coders who could have had all the kinks worked out by now.
Good luck, John. Just remember, nobody plans to fail, they just fail to plan. It looks as though you have fallen into this trapping. Credits keep piling up in my account, which makes me think that I am not getting the “page for page†impressions promised. Cheating seems to be rampant throughout everyone’s concerns. Then you tell us we have to place the widget in an area that I am sure everyone would rather reserve for income potential. Why should we give up prime real estate on our sites for your unproven, horribly flawed widget system? PROVE that your widget system works FIRST, then demand the placement in accordance with the results.
Good luck to all of you. But, if you are using this for the traffic, just remember that the social networks are where it’s at. And, you don’t have to send people away from your site in the mean time!
The Follow-up Today:
Just to give the “loyal†an example of what the “complainers†are talking about, I took my widget off my site yesterday afternoon. (see 10 comments up) I log on to BR today just to see if the “Beta 2″ was up and running and guess what?!? It says that I am still getting traffic to earn credits!
Credits Earned Today: 586
Credits Earned Last 7 Days: 10,132.25
Your Traffic Today: 217
Your Traffic Last 7 Days 4,550
Total Referrals In Your Network: 57
Referral Traffic Today: 369
Referral Traffic Last 7 Days: 5,582.25
on top of that, the “Your Traffic Last 7 Days†is way off. If it is going by impressions, my pageviews for the past 7 days have been as follows: 604, 1463, 2265, 3690, 3311, 2943 and 1140. Now, I am no mathematician, but I believe that those seven numbers equal more than 4,550. Maybe they are going off of visitors? Nope, I had an even 8,000 the past 7 days. Hmmm, anyone else smell the stench?
October 21st, 2007 at 11:07 am
PLEASE BE PATIENT.
We’re working on all of these changes. If you aren’t happy with the service, TAKE THE WIDGET OFF YOUR BLOG! It’s just that simple. We’re busting our butts for YOU to help you drive more traffic to your site. We’re rolling out Phase 2 and it’s taking a bit longer than we expected; but it will all be deployed very soon. (Thank You.)
October 21st, 2007 at 12:15 pm
That was part of my point, John. If you are unsure about how long it will take to roll out something, don’t announce a date. I have taken the widget off of my site. For Pete’s sake, I have a niche that is so small it’s not even funny and Google sends me 10 times more visitors to my site in one day than your widget did all week! How do you justify demanding top billing for your widget when the system is only pulling in 3-7 visitors per day? It is all about the numbers. Over a thirty day period, I average 2,349 visitors per day. On average, BR sends me 5.674 of those. That means you send me 0.0024155% of all my traffic. My adsense CTR is currently at 3.37%. Crunch the numbers; which thing do YOU think will get the coveted real estate on the blog???
I had higher hopes for this system. The intro video placed those hopes there. Why did I get the widget? Cause free traffic is free traffic. But, when you start to restict where I can place it, no. Sorry John, the numbers do not justify the demands for placement.
October 21st, 2007 at 3:59 pm
DAVID - as has already been stated, we’re working hard to improve everything so it will produce more traffic. BUT… I’d like to address some of your points… first of all, the widget doesn’t replace traffic you get from other sources, such as Google. i.e. it’s not like running the widget makes you give up your Google traffic. Running the widget provides traffic IN ADDITION to everything else. The other thing that needs to be pointed out is that the value of any visitors you get from BlogRush is 100X more valuable than traffic you will most likely get from anywhere else. So it’s not just about “quantity” it’s about QUALITY. Because BlogRush is sending your blog *BLOG READERS* from other related blogs. These people are most likely to become regular readers of your blog and continue to come back on a regular basis — growing your traffic over time.
As for our delay issue, we ran into some unexpected issues that made us miss our expected date, it happens.
October 21st, 2007 at 5:26 pm
John - Thanks for the updates. It’s nice to know whats going on. I am looking forward to all these wonderful changes. I have received 7 hits from Blogrush so far and on my 2 month old blog that is a significant percentage. Thanks for all your hard work.
BTW, I have just been going through the archives here. Terrific information!
October 21st, 2007 at 5:37 pm
I’ve been watching all this discussion with interest and have made a note about higher placement of the widget. Currently the widget has about mid-page placement on my blog because I only had one sidebar that would fit it that also contain a lot of other things that I want to give priority placement to. Sadly not everything can be at the top.
The 120 pixel widget will help dramatically for my layout as I have a secondary sidebar specifically to accommodate a 120 pixel width google ad block and not a lot else. So your widget will, almost certainly move up and over on my template.
With that said, something that you may like to consider for a future revision is designing a version of the widget that is customizable like a google text ad block.
Google themselves, suggest that their ads get more click throughs when the ads look more like content rather than ads. Logically the same could be true for a blogrush widget - which looks more like an ad with the surrounding box rather than content.
It’s just a thought - maybe it’s not necessary to do this since the widget does clearly state that it is displaying other blogs, not ads. Something to experiment with for the future though.
October 21st, 2007 at 6:48 pm
To add to what TET just said, another possibility could be an RSS feed version of the BlogRush network. I’m not familiar with all blogging platforms, but on Blogger an RSS feed embedded through Blogger takes the look and feel of the blog, making it look exactly like the rest of the blog. This also has the benefit of being automatically adjusted in terms of width and height to fit the available space. Very easy installation too.
I think the value of Blog Rush goes beyond just traffic. There’s also the benefit of content where you can find blogs of interest and networking where you can get to know other bloggers in the same segment. If nothing else, Blog Rush serves as an ice-breaker. I am going to try a “Found on BlogRush” subsegment next week to spotlight the blogs/posts of interest I found through BR.
However, both traffic and content are important factors in where the widget is placed on someone’s blog as real estate is at a premium one way or the other. I had my widget all the way up in the right column, however, the ratio of posts of interest to 10K-to-be-removed-posts was low, so I dropped it down. Incoming traffic is about 1 per day. As traffic or the quality of posts improve, the widget’s position will also improve. I see it as a fair market-driven way to decide this