September 15, 2007
BlogRush - the Evil Backlink Spam Widget
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…
6 Comments on BlogRush - the Evil Backlink Spam Widget »
September 15, 2007
SEO Backlinks » SEO Backlinks September 15, 2007 12:25 pm @ 9:29 am (Pingback)
[…] BlogRush is SPAM? 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 … […]
Mikec @ 10:42 am:
I just wanted to comment on BlogRush… (I am in no way affiliated with them)
Please be aware that this is a Beta launch of the service, so not everything is perfect yet.
Who knows, they may be planning on releasing several different styles to choose from, besides this standard black look. Which would be a great idea
Mike
September 16, 2007
Candice @ 12:42 pm:
A couple of points a) it was just opened up, so the userbase is not as big or diverse as it could be and b) it’s beta. Things like customizing the appearance will come later. But… those links don’t look spammy to me, at least, not considering how spammy the blogosphere is in general. They’re probably ad-supported niche-sites, low on original content, which I am particularly annoyed by when I wind up on one by accident, but hey… that’s what’s out there these days. The links displayed in my widget don’t look spammy at all, but then again, I didn’t pick a category that’s likely to turn that kind of thing up (I do also think that the list of categories should be much longer, and more specific).
AJ @ 1:31 pm:
Yes, its beta. Still, simple spam controls and templating shouldn’t be too much to ask for in a commercial beta. This isn’t an open source widget, where anyone would expect these kind of gaps. This is a much hyped marketing event, that took ‘many months of developing’ by what is implied to be a team of developers and designers.
The larger point though, is that BlogRush will likley always be a spam widget. Those niche sites with not much content other than as adsense bait are the fodder that keeps internet marketers like Reese in business. Its in his interest to make sure they continue to be promoted.
You might excuse the cynicism since I have been quite jaded by marketing hype by people like John Reese and others, and I think if he wants to start redeeming himself, he could start with something that meets a minimal threshold for the average blogger who isn’t a John Reese fanboy.
September 17, 2007
» 12 Interesting Reviews of John Reese’s BLOG RUSH Money.Power.Wisdom: Which Do YOU Want? @ 12:21 am (Pingback)
[…] : BlogRush - the Evil Backlink Spam Widget […]
September 18, 2007
Andy Bailey @ 9:53 am:
you tell ‘em AJ!
I saw through it the moment I first read about it, I posted 7 reasons why I wont be using it on my blog and it generated a little bit of interest. I even went so far to make a plugin for wordpress that links to the comment authors last post at the bottom of their comment, I think it’s much better to link to the people that participate in your blog than to some stranger who might be a splog.