Web and Graphic Design HQ

I received an email today advising that my BlogRush account was no longer active, with the reason:

because your blog did not pass our Quality Review criteria

Hmmm, is that so?

Let’s go through what I was emailed today… here’s the important part of the message:

The primary reason(s) your blog(s) did not meet our guidelines:
Too Much Promotion And Not Enough Quality Content

Below is a complete list of our 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.

Actually, at this point, my blog has 36 posts — 26 of which are “quality content” and 10 of which are promotion. That means I have 72% quality content and 28% promotional content.

The blog meets the other criteria: frequency of posting, number of posts, in English, none of the “banned” content listed at the end and nothing scraped.

In my stats, around 95 per cent of my traffic is to quality content — the free PHP local date script that has had tens of thousands of downloads over the years.

It doesn’t say much for the “review” process that turned my BlogRush account inactive!

The creator of BlogRush has started this post in the Warrior Forum to say “sorry” — although that could be perceived as saying “we’re about to kick you in the head, sorry” — a bit pointless to say we’re probably going to remove sites by mistake, and then still do so anyway.

To me, that just says that BlogRush’s approach for reviewing blogs in their network is the wrong one — it assumes I’m bad and then wants me to prove otherwise (after a whole month in a sin-bin). BlogRush has the right to do that, but I can’t say the decision has improved my opinion/perception of the author!

Personally, traffic from BlogRush to my site has resulted in just 10 visits (less than 0.3% of my traffic), so I cannot really see BlogRush being that important.

(Mind you, 10 people were interested enough in my blog title to click the link — so my content can’t be that bad!).

So farewell BlogRush! That’s one less imposition on the load time on my web pages!

UPDATE 6 HOURS LATER…

The Warrior Forum post has already been locked! There are two interesting blog posts here (techipedia) and here (SEOpedia) discussing the subject. Techipedia offers an Adblock Plus solution (in Firefox) to disable any BlogRush widget from being displayed — filtering widget.blogrush.com*

SEOpedia also explains that reviewers were paid just US$12 per hour to undertake the reviews — which included this statement:

We’re looking to hire a bunch of people that would like to earn some extra cash. If you or someone you know might be interested, please forward this message to them. This would be perfect for a stay-at-home mom, college student, or anyone else looking to make some extra money.

Gee, sounds like only qualified tech people need apply! Here’s one requirement for the position:

Must know the difference in a quality blog and one that was solely created to try and game the search engines and/or just run a bunch of ads — and/or what a “scraper” blog is that contains no original content and simply uses content taken from other sites with some sort of software program.

None of that applies to this blog in terms of either a “bunch of ads” or a “scraper” blog … obviously not the opinion of the $12/hour reviewer!

Judging by the comments in the already-locked WF post, and the posts I’ve already found on Google within just a few hours — it seems not every reviewer knew what they were doing.

John Reese (BlogRush creator) was floored by a comment on WF that someone would think less of him because a reviewer made the blog inactive within BlogRush. But it doesn’t surprise me at all that someone comes to that conclusion… “the buck stops with BlogRush” on that responsibility and perception. “Inactivating” a legitimate user isn’t going to do anything positive to perceptions. If you pay a reviewer peanuts, and good blogs get penalised — expect a harsh backlash.

Simply apologising in advance — as I mentioned in my original post — really doesn’t cut it. I wonder what the next step will be. It’s a mini PR-crisis for BlogRush.