Blogrush Is Filtering Posts
Now that BlogRush 2.0 has been released and their quality audit has been completed I decided to add the BlogRush widget back to the blog - even though I had removed it a few weeks ago. So far traffic has been modest, but far better than it had been in the weeks up to before I removed it.
While I was checking through my Blogrush stats the other evening I noticed that my post titled “Do Penis Enlargers Work?” was not listed in my BlogRush dashboard in the last 12 posts section. At first I thought this was because the post was too new, but I intentionally left the post up for several days, and still it was never listed.
Could BlogRush be filtering certain words or phrases?
I started to wonder if the word “penis enlarger” might have tripped a filter BlogRush data-center, so I fired-off a support-ticket asking if there was a problem with my feed, or if it was possible that this particular post had been filtered. I waited a few days and never got a response - which means that they aren’t answering support questions or they decided to ignore that particular sensitive question.
Today I made a new post about the my new blogger-award, and within minutes it was showing up in my BlogRush dashboard - proving that BlogRush IS filtering words.
It’s okay, censorship is a good thing!
I’m not trying to make some kind of bash-BlogRush, linkbait post here because I actually think that filtering this type of words is a good thing (unless you’re selling penis enlargers that is). By filtering out potential spam or adult content, BlogRush is making the program better for everyone - everyone except spammers and adult content peddlers. But overall I think this is a good thing. Just keep this in mind when writing your attention grabbing headlines - don’t write something so outrageous that BlogRush blocks it.
UPDATE:
It appears that Blogrush is also filtering the word “blogrush” in post titles because this post is not showing up in my dashboard either. Perhaps more experimentation is in order.
No More BlogRush
After closely watching my stats for weeks to see how much traffic BlogRush has been bringing in, I finally decided that it was not worth the space it was consuming and dropped the widget.
When I first started using BlogRush I received a huge amount of traffic - thousands of hits over just a few days. But slowly traffic dwindled, then after moving the blog here to the new domain last month, traffic from BlogRush has dropped to only 2 or 3 hits per week.
I still have a tremendous amount of respect for John Reese and I am more than willing to give BlogRush a second chance when 2.0 comes out - but in the meantime, I’m keeping with the theme of “less is more” on my blog.
How is BlogRush working for you on your blog? Please post a comment and let us know if it has brought you the amount of traffic that you expected.
AuctionAds Should Hire John Reese
I just finished reading John Reese’s “Shocking Changes At BlogRush” post and I am completely amazed at how he so totally gets it.
Let’s compare another new startup company AuctionAds, to BlogRush, and how they’ve handled a few situations:
Both ventures are very young, both experienced explosive, unexpected growth almost immediately, and both have experienced growing pains due to their success. For both, this has resulted in system wide problems like incorrect stats, downtime, etc - very similar in many respects.
Now lets look at how the two companies have dealt with these issues:
- AuctionAds: Ignore the problem(s); Make no announcements in the blog or give any other information to customers for weeks (if at all), claim to have fixed the problem(s) when they are not fixed, ignore user/support requests; blame publishers for the problems
- BlogRush: Post updates that members cannot miss each time they log in for even the smallest of problems; DO/accomplish what they say they are going to do; listen to user feedback and actually give (some of) what is asked for; Post a two-page letter that members cannot miss explaining how they’ve made mistakes, how they plan to fix them, publicly identify other problems with the system and how they plan to fix them, explain other issues and why they are important to the company, and remind all BlogRush users that THEY are what is important to the company
Now; I know these differences are subtle - but if you look very closely you may see Read more
BlogRush: How I Accidentally Get More Impressions
Just like everyone else this weekend I signed up for BlogRush in eager anticipation of the flood of traffic it would bring. After reading more about BlogRush though, I realized that because my blog does not get nearly as much traffic as the really, really big guys, I probably would not get very many impressions/clicks from it. However I was pleasantly surprised today when I started seeing significant traffic with the BlogRush referrer on it, but I was puzzled at how I could be generating so many impressions.
How I am able to generate so many BlogRush impressions:
As I was pouring through my logs scratching my head trying to figure out why I was getting so much traffic from BlogRush it hit me: I have a page over at the main site that ranks between #2 and #5 (it changes day-to-day) for the search term “make money on the internet“, and gets a lot of traffic. Saturday I updated that page with information about BlogRush, but instead of taking the time to take a screenshot and make a JPG of the BlogRush Widget, I just pasted the actual code from my blog right onto that page. The result of my laziness? Instant thousands of impressions being recorded to my BlogRush account! I’m sure the guys at BlogRush will eventually fix this by making sure that domain on pages with the BlogRush widget match the domain listed in our account settings, but until then, if you have a website that gets a lot of traffic that is independent from your blog, throw your widget code on it and drum-up a few extra impressions.
If you came to this page via BlogRush, then it works!
