10,000 Pissed Off BlogRush Users
October 22, 2007 · Print Post · Bookmark post
This morning I received an email saying “Congratulations, You are receiving this update because your blog has passed our strict Quality Guidelines and criteria…” While others probably received a more negative email. Where is this coming from? Well the hype is starting all over and it is all negative hype, all surrounding BlogRush.
A while back I wrote a post about how BlogRush is not for the Little Guys. Is this still true? With the new system in place? Or is it now “BlogRush is not for the Big Guys?” Popular high quality oriented sites are now becoming inactive after the sweep of BlogRush audit team. Were these blogs properly audited?
I went ahead and looked at my RSS reader and found JohnCow.com has been banned from blogrush. His post is very comical and serious as well. The mysterious cow, breaks down BlogRush’s guidelines, trying to find a loop hole if he really is not meeting the requirements of BlogRush. I personally find this requirement and explanation funny:
The blog’s primary contain must be in English. BlogRush is currently not available for non-English blogs. — Do You Understand The Words That Are Coming Out Of Our Mouth?
Hmm I wonder if they did ban the cow because his blog is not in proper English? I mean he does spell money incorrectly, mooney.
Well this cause a stir and the Cow has made it known, in one of my favorite forums. He listed his article for the world to see, because his blog was not properly written in English or spelling errors. This caused a commotion in the forums and others joined in saying they too were banned.
Reading all the users input and participation I found another blog who has posted their bannish cries, SeoPedia. But one thing stuck out besides the block quoted emails:
Important PS: An anomymous tipper just sent me this e-mail that John Reese has sent to a LOT of guys. So the people that edit the quality guidelines of BLogrush are “a bunch of people that would like to earn some extra cashâ€. Way to go Reese:
Is this true, who did the email go to? What criteria did they have to fit in? Was it by favoritism? Was it outsourced? John Reese, what is he up to?
I wonder if John Reese is up to no good? I am glad I was not banned - makes me feel ‘cool’ that I have quality content and it is written in proper English, I guess. Though I will not put the widget on my blog, I do have a good tier system of others - which will supply the traffic to me. I have been seeing traffic here and there to my blog from the widgets, but it is still not the rush it was hyped up to be. I still want to see more stats but the dashboard is down.
Here are some other websites or blog I found that were banned as well:
Techipedia says:
Can someone tell me where I’ve gone wrong here? I assume that BlogRush does not want to be affiliated with sites that speak negatively of the program, which of course, I did. (What else is new?
) I’d be interested to see if others have suffered the same fate.
InterWebHunt says:
Coming from a quality control team this isn’t the best way to word things:
“The blog’s primary contain must be in English. BlogRush is currently not available for non-English blogs.â€
Spellcheck much?
LocalSeoGuide says:
Now let me get this straight - I write nothing but unique content every day for a month with a number of other high quality sites picking up my posts, linking to these pages, adding comments, etc. And my blog is not unique enough?
As you can see they are a little piss off. English blogs that do not write in English? Quality blogs that are not really quality? Like the Cow says quality is all about perspective. What really defines quality?
All in all, John is doing the ‘Nelson’ to Quality English written blogs, which I can say the quality control team needs to re think who they are banning and making inactive.

With so much negativity around I wonder if these blogs are doing the ‘Nelson’ to John Reese? I can see they would be mad, yet I have to see the new system take effect and my dashboard is still out of commission!































October 22nd, 2007 12:22 pm
Hey Ian,
I am thinking that Blogrush, like any start-up, is going through growing pains. This particular growing pain, unfortunately for them, happens to be way too public.
Andrew
October 22nd, 2007 8:41 pm
i think reese is too obsessed with “one of the biggest search engine in the net”, thus following it banning here and there. acts like a dictator, tells people what shall and shall not do. unfortunately, bl0grush is still to young, and start playing cocky and arrogant in infancy will do more bad than good..
October 23rd, 2007 1:15 pm
I use it, I got approved, I look at it on others’ sites. Does it bring a flood of traffic. No. Does it bring traffic? Yes.
Unless it seriously messes up, I”ll continue to use Blogrush. Then again, I used to put other blogs’ RSS feeds in my sidebars so readers could see what else is going on out there.
October 23rd, 2007 1:27 pm
Here’s what one problem was:
“I got to the bottom of why your blog wasn’t approved… it’s because your BlogURL was in our system as “locaseoguide.com†; apparently you made a typo when creating your original account. ”
I think that’s hilarious! Users blame the system when it is their own fault. As a software developer, I can’t stand users that get furious and start hating the company for something that they did wrong. Stop acting like a baby about BlogRush. Have some patience and investigate the matter yourself if you care so much about membership in this system. If you don’t care about BlogRush, stop hating.
Wah wah.
October 23rd, 2007 2:12 pm
You’re right, it IS annoying when users blame the developer / company for their own error!
It may well be 6 of one, half a douzen of the other in this case. Did BlogRush screen blogs initially when they launched? If not, then I’d ask why not? If they did, then why didn’t they catch splogs etc at that point?
I don’t think anyone can argue with the fact that there must be some screening done to minimise spam showing up in the system, and that is going to be subjective to a degree (what is a splog?).
Maybe it wasn’t so wise to announce on the income.com blog - we just got rid of 10,000 blogs. For all we know, 99.9% of those may well have been in the spam zone, but again, why was it all done in one go without warning, and why was there no clear policy from the beginning?
Did they get a bit too wrapped up in their own hype initially?
October 23rd, 2007 3:37 pm
Hey Joseph & Simon,
As you can see on my blog I fully copped to the typo issue. However you may feel about incompetent users, from my POV the big error here was how Blogrush communicated this info to me and other users like me. If they had told me that was the issue up front I would have had no problem with them. I still have no problem with them. I just wasn’t crazy about the way they went about things.
Andrew
October 23rd, 2007 7:52 pm
Hey Andrew,
Sorry, didn’t mean to sound as though I was levelling any criticism at you. I was just agreeing with a more general point (that from a dev’s point of view, it gets frustrating if users don’t read the instructions). I didn’t mean to imply that you personally hadn’t read them - there was nothing to read in this case.
I completely agree with you that the lack of warning before the ‘cull’ was hardly the best way to go about matters. Proof enough of that can be seen on the income.com blog, they had to close off the comments section.
October 23rd, 2007 7:54 pm
No worries Simon!
October 26th, 2007 8:45 am
I think that it was a necessary action. Blog Rush is a good idea with good design but no one actually clicking links. Actually I recently joined and my status was pending so I am still waiting for their decision.
If they approve me they are the best if not go to hell