Last week I installed the Blogrush applet here on the website, and for the past week I have been monitoring how much traffic the applet is bringing to the website.
After a week of utilization and careful examination of log files and statistics I saw no inbound traffic being generated, which made me do some investigating.
What I found is that some of the sites with links on the applet don’t appear to be running the Blogrush applet on their own pages, yet somehow their articles are being listed in the Blogrush applet on my blog.
The way it is supposed to work is for each page load you have you get a reciprocal listing on another site and vice versa. I am questioning how people are getting links in my applet with no apparent blogrush applet running on their own site.
For example, this link on Mashable which showed up on my GNC applet has no Blogrush applet loading. I assumed they were getting credits from their home page or other Mashable page. When I went to the Mashable home page their was no BlogRush Applet on that page either.
In fact I looked all over the Mashable website and I did not see the applet any place. Maybe I am missing it somewhere but how is Mashable getting a link in the Blogrush Applet if they are not running the Blogrush applet on their website? I could have missed the applet but I looked at a lot of pages.
While this is just one example, there are a lot more sites like this that I came across. Are the Blogrush folks allowing people to pay to have their articles listed? Are sites abusing the system somehow and racking up credits?
I can accept no inbound traffic — that is part of the game — but it looks awful fishy to me when I can’t find the applet on some participating websites that are getting listings on my own blog.
I heard of blogrush via twitter, through the applet on the site…and waited. The numbers make no sense to me, but it may not be blogrush’s fault. Thank you for taking the time to dig deeper into blogrush, keep your readers posted. In the meantime, my applet is still there.
I played with Blog Rush for a while, and had the same questions. I didn’t see any connection between the sites that showed up inside the widget and the actual, independent blogs that hosted it in their sidebars. So I nixed it.
Have you looked at CLIQ? It lets you set up your own, closed network of blogs and headlines in a widget. Kind of like webrings — remember webrings? — for the Web 2.0 generation. Check it out. It may be a better option… setting up a tech bloggers’ CLIQ. I set one up for Hawaii bloggers:
http://www.cliqin.com/web/cliq_detail/205
Todd,
I can tell you why it might be happening – for example, with my site.
I signed up while they were upgrading their system, so I couldn’t see any of their reports. I had the widget on my page for a month and a half. Once the system FINALLY showed me some data, I could see that I had over 4,000 impressions (I don’t have a high traffic blog), and not one single click through. I removed the widget, but couldn’t find a way to close my account – so some of my posts are still floating around, even though I no longer participate.
Hi Todd,
When I received this post in my Thunderbird RSS feed, I went to signup. Posted the widget on my blog, and waited 24 hours for the links to start showing.
Now that I have links in my blogrush, I started clicking the links and going to the sites. I didn’t find many of the widgets on the pages that I was directed too, but after clicking on several of the pages I managed to find the widgets.
So my conclusion is people are using blogrush to gain traffic, but hiding the widget on less visited pages. Maybe this is on purpose, maybe not.