About a month ago, we signed up for a new service called BlogRush for Gizmos for Geeks. BlogRush is essentially a networking tool where you earn credits based on how many times the widget is displayed on your site (i.e. pageviews) and in turn, links to current articles on your site are displayed in the widget on other similar blogs.
Since its launch, BlogRush has had tons of issues with spammer types signing up for the service to up their traffic, and so they decided to move from an automated sign up to a manual review process. We just got an e-mail saying that GfG was reviewed and that it did not meet any of their “Quality Review” criteria. I had to laugh; I may have even snorted. Reading through their list of 7 criteria, I found it rather ironic that we (our site) didn’t meet all of those requirements easily. I’ll post the “Quality Guidelines” below.
About the only thing that we could be faulted for is too much advertising on the site, but honestly, what blog out there isn’t trying to make some money, and how do you do it without advertising? We’re not blogging to drum up buzz for something else that we sell. Our blog is our product. But come on – we have 3 ads on the main page. Three, for Pete’s sake.
We found out about BlogRush from Shoemoney’s blog and guess how many distinct ads he has on his blog – 9 at least count. I’m not faulting Shoe at all. Actually, quite the opposite. God bless him for being able to stick that many ads on his site. If you told pretty much anyone that they could plaster their car with ads and never have to work again, do you think they’d stop to think about it for a minute? Hell no.
In case you’re wondering if we’re going to pursue BlogRush to get reinstated, the answer is nope. For our couple hundred thousand impressions, or whatever it was (since we can’t see our statistics any more), we did not get a single referral. Not one.
Guess what we’re going to do with our newly freed up page real estate? Yup, you got it – stick an ad there!
Read on for BlogRush’s admirable, but strangely enforced, list of Quality Guidelines.
BlogRush Quality Guidelines:
- 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.
