I post at SearchCommander.com now, and this post was published 17 years 2 months 9 days ago. This industry changes FAST, so blindly following the advice here *may not* be a good idea! If you're at all unsure, feel free to hit me up on Twitter and ask.
With Blog Rush, you can easily give links to other people right on your blog, and you might get absolutely nothing in return. Wow, this is going to catch on like wildfire, isn’t it?
To be fair, I suspect (hope) it’s just a bug in the program that allows me to link to people that have signed up but are not playing fair… It must be, right? Otherwise, why would anyone need or want to use this thing?
If you’re involved in the Internet marketing world at all, it would have been hard to miss last week’s rollout of Blog Rush. I must have received ten different e-mail notices and invitations, some from some very well-respected marketers, and someone told me it was even mentioned on Shoemoney’s show.
Blog Rush is a method of displaying post titles with links from other associated subject matter blogs throughout the blogosphere on your blog, and they in turn do the same for you..
Participants get links on related blogs, sending visitors back and forth (and maybe even passing some PR?). Every time a new page refreshes, there are links to different associated blogs.
The really nice thing is that Blog Rush actually provides post-level links, and not just blog homepage links, so you’re getting very targeted keyword specific links right your deepest pages from other relevant blogs.
Is this a “linking scheme” as defined by Google? I don’t really think so because you’re actually providing links to other relevant sites and posts that may benefit your readers. The idea seemed sound to me, so I signed up.
Because I frequently write about more than just search marketing, I chose to add my blog to the “technology category”. Since my single most popular blog post last month was “How to reprogram your Comcast remote to skip commercials“on your DVR, this made the most sense to me.
At first I tried to place it in the page of specific posts, instead of using the widget, but had a couple of problems, so I went with the widget method instead, and it works fine.
You can (CURRENTLY) see the widget in action in the right sidebar of my blog, but here is a static image in case it’s gone by the time you read this –
The fact is, following those links in the widget do indeed take me to other relevant blog posts, but of the dozen or so links I just tested from my own blog, only one of the pages had the widget installed on their site. What’s that all about?
If you can add your blog to the network and get it displayed on some people’s sites without having the box appear on your own site, and then where’s the incentive to use it at all?
I would hope (expect, demand etc.) that there is going to be some mechanism in place to ensure that the only blogs appearing in the wake it are those which have the widget appearing on their blogs. Maybe that mechanism is alread in place, and just not functioning?
For now, I’ll leave the widget in place, and keep an eye on my logs to see if it brings me any traffic, but otherwise, what’s the story here, Blog Rush? (Referral link)
I’m interested in finding out why the BlogRush Javascript sends one’s blog page URL and visitor REFERRER URL back to the BlogRush server with every impression of the widget.
All these new services are data mines.
😉
nada
Dewald:
There is an explanation for this, in that the appearance of your ad on the blogs of others is based on the number of impressions the widget gets on your own blog.
tadanada:
Datamines? I find nothing malicious in this widget… Care to clarify?
Blog Rush is causing quite a stir and I will be updating with a new post soon.
In the meantime I am continuing my use, and the widget is visible on my blog, at this time, in the right sidebar. (So if you read fresh this page 10,000 times, it will help 😉
Don’t wait it out. It’s a useless widget that’s not going to bring you significant traffic.
Just like a banner-exchange system, it doesn’t work without requiring its participants to place it in a prominent position, above the fold.
Take the placement of your Blog Rush widget for example. You’re generating the page views to earn your reciprocal page view from another blog, but I doubt that your Blog Rush widget is sharing any traffic.
Same goes for most bloggers. In the end, everyone is generating useless impressions.
The one site that actually benefits from all of this is BlogRush.com
“a useless widget that’s not going to bring you significant traffic.” –
Very well put, SP – I committed to leave it on for at least 30 days as part of a test, and placing it as low as I did was a compromise because I actually wanted it lower than my affiliate ads 😉