Last Updated on April 20, 2020
Once upon a time, there was a new service promising bloggers floods of traffic, in exchange for displaying a “not-so-small” widget on their blogs.
Big guys promoted this new thing, so many conscious bloggers, willing to succeed, grabbed the widget, displayed it, promoted the service in question, hoping to get a big bunch of referrals and even a bigger bunch of visitors. The thing got viral, blogs sidebars started to look alike more and more, like children suffering with Progeria, who rather ressemble each other than their parents. It was like a blog disease, an irritation, a real BlogRash, expanding all over the blogosphere, contaminating also the few bloggers who did not display the rash, making some of them expose their reasons why they wouldn’t agree with such a “service”.
More and more people who got this BlogRash, started to realize that they could get more traffic to their sites if they were sitting in front of the church on Monday, with a cardboard branded with their site URL. Some of them (like myself) got rid of the rash, leaving the sidebar space for other things.
Several weeks later (a.k.a. this morning), I found a message in my inbox, saying “Your … Account Is Now INACTIVE”:
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.We recently reviewed your blog(s) located at:
We determined that your blog did not meet our strict quality
guidelines. Please do not take this personally but realize that we must abide by
a very strict set of quality guidelines. (They are listed below.)If you feel you have made the necessary changes to your blog(s) to meet
our guidelines, you can resubmit your blog(s) for review after this
date:
Wednesday, November 21, 2007
Ha, ha! MY BLOG did not pass their criteria???? It’s their criteria which did not pass the requirements to be displayed on my blog!!!
Taking a look at Sphinn, I found out that I’m not the only one whose blog is not worthy of this sidebar rash. Among other outstanding blogs which were not suitable to bear this thing on their sidebars are:
SeoPedia: please read this article, to find out more about the way BlogRush (the official name of this blog rash) recruited its reviewers 😆
Techipedia: Tamar Weinberg, the author of the blog suspects that her account was suspended because she wrote a negative post about BlogRush some time ago.
134you: the message said there were not enough posts on the blog.
JohnCow: if the cow is not giving fresh, original, daily milk, I don’t know who does!
LocalSEOGuide: here you can read in the comments the excuses of John reese, who agrees that his team of reviewers does a monkey job.
CogSEO Blog: this blog was not rejected, despite the fact that the owner asked to be deleted from the system. Read the message he just got from John Reese: they are moving on to phase 2 (first you got the rash, now you’re getting the itch).
What do you think of BlogRash… eeerr… Rush… whatever?
“More and more people who got this BlogRash, started to realize that they could get more traffic to their sites if they were sitting in front of the church on Monday, with a cardboard branded with their site URL.” :))
Please change my name from 123you to 134you 🙂
Oh, and I like your article, so I don’t buy you anything :))
I’m pretty happy after this morning, don’t you think?
Thanks for the morning laugh, Simonne.
You’ve got a tongue sharper than a butcher knife, if you know what I mean, and I absolutely love that sharp sense of humour of yours 🙂
I was suspicious of this BlogRush from the beginning. I’m very picky when it comes to displaying things on my blog’s sidebar. Now I see that it’s good that I didn’t compromise for the sake of the promised traffic.
Did you notice that they (BlogRush) dated their email to you as it was coming from future – November 21, 2007?
Hi Diana, sorry for the mistake. I corrected your name (luckily there is copy-paste, so the link was OK).
You don’t have to buy me anything, I’m glad to have you here as a visitor. I imagine you are happy. I wonder how John Reese feels about his marvellous employees 😉
oh, yes, Darren did write about it, and I remember thinking how wise was it for him to advertise a brand new service that he himself hasn’t tested that much yet…
I’m glad though that you’ve tried them out, and wrote the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth about their rash service.
You are welcome InspirationBit :). You can imagine what a laugh I had when I opened my email and saw that message. I tried it because I was curious (and because Darren Rowse wrote about them), but I took it out after a few days (when I saw the huge amount of traffic – 3 visits – coming from there).
The message was not dated in the future: that is the date when his holyness, the Rash king allows me to submit my blog again 😆
Darren also wrote at a point that he had an amazing conversion rate of 0.00… whatever.
I’m also glad I tried them: we need to have some fun every now and then, don’t we?
ONG ! What a sad day, Simonne .. really, I have now the best-quality crocodile tears covering my eyes .. yet I keep asking to myself are sadness tears or are because I roflamo ..
I`m a permanent allmost-beginner (or less) at speaking english there for I would appreciate if you`ll be so kind to translate the bellow phraze, eventually some will give it a good use ..
La pomul laudat sa nu te duci cu sacul.
(-;
Let me help you: “Don’t go with a sack to the praised fruit tree.” Not that I know to much English, but I find the translation on the internet 🙂
Ha, ha! Valentin, I’m so sorry for your sadness 😉
Thank you Diana, for helping me with the translation. Who cares if you knew it or you found it on the internet? It’s the result which matters most of the time 😆
Hi Darren,
Yes, apparently phase 2 is next…I wonder exactly who will get screwed in that bit. Maybe phase 2 is a full body infection of the BlogRush rash?
BTW…I am Melanie…He is a she =-)
I sent the wonderful BlogRush support yet ANOTHER letter. This time, responding to them in the manner in which they in fact have treated me…So we shall See what happens.
I only joined to check it out, I honestly have no interest in such schemes…But wished to deliver an honest review. BlogRush however, does not allow viewing of it’s information without membership. I would have done it anyhow to evaluate the widget, but it’s still rather discerning that they have a clause granting…
“””royalty-free, and non-exclusive license to reproduce, modify, adapt and publish the Content solely for the purpose of promoting your blog.”””
No one licenses my content but me! For any reason. Then I find out that I cannot just quit, or stop my membership…It’s quite a bad situation for a company to behave in this manner and expect trust.
–Melanie Prough
SEOCog
OIC you are not Darren either…Oh my
Apologies…
Hi Melanie, I’m not Darren, but I appreciate your input very much. Thank you.
This makes me feel special as I received an email telling me that my blog passed their strict guidelines. I have since removed the widget and I now use a service called CLIQ which is like a blogrush but the user has all sorts of control over who joins and what not.
If legitimate blogs are indeed being removed from their system, this is more bad press that John is going to receive. The reviewers should of just deleted all of the blogs that were blatantly spam blogs.
Well, Jeff, it seems that your blog was not reviewed by a monkey 😆
I suppose John had enough negative publicity these days. It’s funny how he spends time to comment on blogs, saying that he is sorry for the mistake 😉
I didn’t know about Cliq. I remember seeing it on some blogs, but I didn’t check it out.
very interesting, but I don’t agree with you
Idetrorce