BlogRush After hearing about John Reese’s latest project, BlogRush, geared towards bloggers wanting to share traffic with one another, I decided to give it a spin for myself – I even created a couple video tutorials for installing the widget. But, after having it installed for a little under a week, I’m beginning to develop some reservations about the program.

The Good

First, let’s look at why this can be a wonderful thing. It’s white hat. Bloggers share their traffic with one another based on a category system. Basically, only the blogs listed within the category you selected when you sign up will be syndicated within your BlogRush widget which should ensure that the traffic is targeted. Many people are already reporting an increase in traffic and feed subscriptions from BlogRush and now that we finally have stats, things have been looking up.

The Bad

Of course, other bloggers may not have the same luck with the program based on the simple fact that they got in on it late. Others have, correctly, raised the point that BlogRush is an elaborate MLM traffic exchange. The people at the top of the pyramid – the earliest adopters and popular bloggers – are more likely to reap the most benefit although they may not need it; a case of the rich getting richer.

The (Potentially Very) Ugly

The bad shouldn’t be bad enough to deter you because, although you get in late, you can still reap the benefits of the traffic. In other words, you’ll still get views in the widget even if you don’t have thousands of referral credits as others do and you have opportunities to earn more by getting your friends and readers to join under you. But, there is something that could potentially get out of hand if left unchecked: The low threshold for entry.

Today, I noticed a strange, yet familiar post title in the sidebar widget; it read, “Hello World!” Anyone who’s installed WordPress for the first time would recognize it as the title for the default first post. I figured that maybe someone was just using the title to introduce a product or service, but after clicking through to read it, low and behold, it was a brand new WP blog with absolutely no content.

A new blog with no content would never (I repeat never) be knowingly approved for a link from my site, not even in the comment section, so I don’t like it when a widget in my sidebar links out to one. When you sign up for BlogRush, there is no approval period and, now I’m aware, there is no blog review process either. That means any Tom, Dick, or Harry with an RSS feed and a website could get approved into the BlogRush traffic exchange program and start spamming the system to kingdom come.

Over the next week or so, I’ll definitely be keeping an eye on the widget and the content it links out to. If I start seeing more links to brand new blogs or websites with little value to my readers, I’ll nuke it altogether. I sincerely hope that John and team can get some checks and balances put into place soon so we can avoid this problem in the future.

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