BlogRush Review and Rant …

If you are looking to promote your new Internet property after you purchased that brand new domain, a blog is a perfect way to do it. Wordpress makes it incredibly easy. Once you do, you’ll want to start driving traffic to it so that you can make your domain more valuable when you sell.

One of those ways is through developing backlinks. There are good backlinks, and there are evil backlinks. Evil backlinks will kill your google ranking, kill your readership, and make you a pariah among the blogging elite (not that thats important).

So , thus comes my rant on BlogRush.

BlogRush is a twist on blogroll and feed widgets that provide links to other people’s blog feeds. In this case, BlogRush is simply a feed aggregator, so you are receiving a random selection of feeds with a certain category that is in theory a category similar to your blog.

NomKit is a new blog, so I’m (desperately) eager to drive traffic to it. My goals in driving traffic are to 1) learn a little SEO and 2) drive interest to my soon to launch site, NomStock.com . It is not currently one of my goals to generate Adsense or similar income.

So the promise of BlogRush is to drive targeted traffic to your site for free. Someone reading another blog with a blogrush widget on it will see feed links that for the same category that the blog that hosts the widget. They click on the link, bingo, the destination blog receives that reader’s ‘targeted’ traffic.

Great idea; I’m not sure how unique it is, but very nice. I like it.

Bad implementation.

Here’s what it looks like on my blog (keep reading past the graphic..):

Whats wrong with this picture? Put another way, How many BlogRush links are shown, and how many of them are obviously SPAM?

I see 5 BlogRush links, 3 are SPAM , or look like SPAM ( I am not going to click the links to find out; tip: if you write a blog post, don’t make the title read like SPAM if its not ) Thats 60% of the displayed links, not counting the 2 plugs for BlogRush itself.

(aside: Why is it so damn ugly? Adsense spam is bad enough but even adsense allows you to customize the look.)

Ok, if the other 2 links aren’t spam, they certainly come close to what i will refer to as sausage- links that may be of interest to the same demographic that reads my blog, but they are not in any way even remotely related to domaining.

Note: Don’t take the above rant as an implication that I’m not going to ad advertisements to the blog some day… but if I do, hopefully it will be in a way that enhances the site, or at least doesn’t detract from it. What a concept…

SourceForge.net just approved my LAMPcheck project, which grew out of a need to validate that my hosting met the requirements of the Elgg social networking script. In short, the script will check for the correct versions of apache, mysql, and php and their associated modules for a given application’s requirements.

You can read more about LAMPcheck at the project’s home page, which I’m hosting on NomKit.

http://www.nomkit.com/welcome-to-the-lampcheck-project-home-page

1. Domain Name Analyzer Review (freeware)

This is one of my most used tools. I have it saved as a shortcut on my start menu so I can launch it anytime I want to brainstorm domain names. Its fast, free, and uses few system resources. I simply start it up, click Names/Add Names from the menu, and start typing in as many name ideas as I can come up with. I then let it check those while I leave the ‘Add Names’ dialog open so I can continue to add names while the first batch processes. It checks names in real time, so its very reliable and uses smart timing so as not to get your IP address blocked by the whois services. Unlike many freeware tools for domain names, its well thought out , relatively intuitive, and overall very well developed (There’s nothing worse than suffering through what looks to be someone’s visual basic 101 homework assignment).

2. Enom Review

I continue to be astonished with enom’s incredible ‘instant on’ DNS system that literally takes your site live in a matter of minutes after registration. No more 2 day wait for the registrar’s dns servers to kick in. I can find a name, register it with enom, create the site at site5, and browse live to it in 5 minutes - the longest part of the process is creating the site at site5’s admin panel. With some simple publishing tools, I can have decent content in under an hour. In a future post, I’ll detail my workflow and all the tools I use.

I wouldn’t recommend enom’s online tool set for finding domains, but it can’t be beat for registration and administration. It is definitely more expensive than most, but its won my loyalty for quality of infrastructure, DNS administration interface, API, and in my opinion, a relatively low noise factor for ads (unlike GoDaddy) , and minimal hassle for transferring domains after a sale (probably 2 clicks).

For all you *domain tasters, they also offer a low $.25 fee for cancellation through their API within the grace period.

3. DomainsBot.com Review

DomainsBot (with an s) - An improved NameBoy … I just started using this tool , but already it has proven worth the time. Use the ‘Advanced Search’ feature and limit your search to 2 or 3 max keywords, and it will find high quality available domains.

4. PremiumDrops.com Review

I started using this site because of the recommendation that it supported *domain tasting (which it effectively doesn’t since every request err’s out with a message that they have maxed their 10k limit) If you can ignore the expired certificates, buggy login (continues to tell me my email address is invalid) , confusing UI, and cranky list results it can actually find you bankable domains. I primarily use it for its ‘Pre-compiled list results’, not its search features, which appear either outright broken, or not worth the effort.

They also have a useful domain terms page which explains things like LP (link popularity, link saturation,etc) : http://www.premiumdrops.com/terms.html

5. ExpiredDomains Review ( freeware expired domain finder)

This is a freeware program that will find expired domains . Its UI is clunky and not intuitive for the casual user ( you need to create search ‘rules’ that you then apply against a downloaded set of expired domain names) , but its relatively fast and uses few CPU resources.

Others…

NameBoy

Not used so much anymore, but one of my old time favorites, if for no reason because it was the first ‘name spinner’ tool that I used that actually created bankable domains. Its still worth a shot, but I don’t think the algorithm has been updated in years.

*Domain tasting is something that I’ll delve into in a future post, but essentially it is a rather controversial but completely legal and legitimate process that allows you to register a domain for a few days for free or very low cost