Banned From BlogRush
Posted on October 22nd, 2007 by John Cow under Ramblings, The NetIf you are new here then you will want to CLICK HERE to enter to WIN an LCD TV, Ipod Touch, Flip Mino and More!
Never a boring day as a cow in the blogosphere. Take this morning for example. We woke up and had a look through our inbox. Besides all the great article recommendations for the Cow Tipping hot line we had asked for yesterday (thanks guys, there’s some good stuff in there!) we found an email from John Reese and his BlogRush team. Was it the email that would finally reveal the new look they have been postponing all the time? Was it to inform us about some nifty new features? NO! It was the email that has effectively banned us from the BlogRush network. Oh well, it was time to write about them again anyway after weeks and weeks of empty promises from their side.
Great, so after we got banned and unbanned from Google Adsense and Text-Link-Ads, is it now time to take on John Reese and his BlogRush?
A little surprised to say the least as we’ve managed to get nearly 1000 bloggers as direct referrals into their network by promoting them, including JohnChow himself, our current credit rate was high enough to ensure us good blogrush traffic until probably our retirement and beyond. Here’s a part of the email we received:
-
We recently reviewed your blog(s) located at:
http://www.johncow.com
We determined that your blog did not meet our strict quality guidelines. Please do not take this personally but realize that we must abide by a very strict set of quality guidelines. (They are listed below.)
We’re not meeting the guidelines eh? Let’s have a look at those:
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. — We’d like to think that we do provide unique content that provides opinions. Take this post for example, our honest and unique opinion about blogrush and their silly little contradictions.
- 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. — Looks like we’re updating at least several times a month. Once per day can be considered as several times per month, right?
- The blog should already contain at least 10-12 quality posts. New blogs with very little content will not be accepted. — OK, you might have caught us there, but then again, quality is merely a point of perspective
- 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?
- 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. — Yeah yeah, we know how much you care about quality. In regards to excessive amounts of advertising, guess you’re going to ban John Chow some time later today?
- 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. — Yeah, quality rocks! amen.
- 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. — Let’s see, check, check, check, check, copyright infringement, check. Looks we’re found not guilty of hosting those types of content and adhere to your every commend Mr Reese. So what’s up?
We would love to get Mr Reese’s explanation on why this blog got banned, one of the first to start successfully promoting blogrush and delivering them nearly 1000 direct referrals last time we could check. Perhaps they went bust and couldn’t afford our credits anymore? We held up our end of the bargain, promoted the widget, generated the traffic, but Mr Reese and his team seem to be unable to cope with the amount of exposure their widget has gotten. It’s bad for any marketer to over-promise and under-deliver. Wonder how many more blogs out there got banned for no apparent reason..
Update: After this post, our pingback to Mr Reese’s was published on his blog about the blog banning. Right after that the comments section was closed so people can’t reply and speak their mind on the about the whole situation. WTF Mr Reese?!

Update 2: And now our pingback has been swept under the rug too. Thanks John.
Can we ask you guys to stumble, Digg, reddit, delicious and Sphinn this post? Even though John seems to be covering his tracks, we feel everyone has a right to know what BlogRush is doing. Your votes are very much appreciated!


















we got banned too. Who cares?
I knew something like that will happen … I’m happy I didn’t try blog rush …too much hype for nothing…Look like blog rush won’t make 1 year
Yes, I was banned too! I had also generated some referals and been responding to their previous posts with recommendations and so on as they requested.
I have hunch we’ll never find out why the our blogs were banned. It would have been good to have a specific reason!
That’s why I took off the widget like a month ago. The service may be great, but stuff like this is what kills it. John Reese has done some great stuff on the internet, but perhaps BlogRush was a little too much, too soon and a little under prepared.
It must be all the cow talk on here!!
Just watch your visitor numbers fade away now….
“Congratulations!
You are receiving this update because your blog has passed our strict
Quality Guidelines and criteria — we believe you have a high-quality
blog and we are happy you’re a member of our network!”
for some reasons i did not get that email, but a lot of my friends have got this, but then who cares, as blog rush was just a waste of my time!
I didn’t get banned but removed them from my blog long ago.
I just applied yesterday and I got an e-mail from them just now that I passed the “strict guidelines”! I am experimenting their widget though.
I guess your site will not need to depend on it right?
John Reese from BlogRush here.
I am not sure why your blog wasn’t approved by the reviewer that reviewed your blog. (We have a team of reviewers.) From what I can tell, your blog passes our guidelines. I’m not sure if the reviewer loaded your blog on a day where your primary post(s) were heavy on the promotional side or not — that’s just a guess of what might have influenced them.
You have my email address from this comment. Please contact me directly (if you wish) and I will investigate the issue for you and see about reactivating your account.
AND FOR THE RECORD…
No one is being BANNED from BlogRush. If any account doesn’t have any approved blogs, the account is moved to an “inactive” status until changes are made or until another blog that meets our guidelines gets approved. Nothing happens to referrals or an account’s referral network; they are left completely intact and as soon as the account is “active” again everything returns to the way it was.
* I just found out that your pingback message was deleted by one of our blog moderators because we don’t want any comments (or pingbacks) showing up for that main post. A few childish users started posting profanity and other garbage that was getting past our filters and we needed to shut it off for now.
There’s no “conspiracy theory” happening.
In fact, we’ve been incredibly transparent and honest ever since we launched — openly admitting to mistakes that we’ve made and what we planned to do about them.
~John
I just got an email from them about 5 minutes after writing how blog rush had worn out its welcome and removed the widget from my site. Bye-bye blog rush I say.
http://www.ablogaboutnothing.com/blog-rush-worn
Here Guys, I have Submitted to DIGG. Vote your heart out!
Oh, by the way, I got banned too. Sorry for the second post.
So they made a mistake… but removing the trackback etc is a little conceited.
Boy, some strict policy
My blog is new with little content, I removed the widget a loooong time ago, and I have very few referrels and yet I was approved. What a bunch of idiots.
We got the mail as well but I had already uninstalled blogrush widget when I was advised it puts all sorts of odd pieces of code into your blogger template and messes with adsense code. So I wasn’t that upset.
I removed the code completely just after a few days using BlogRush. But I’m not banned, weird. Anyway, who cares. It’s not something people would bother.
Join the club that has be deactivated from blogrush
. In any case, I had removed the widget quite some time back. It wasn’t delivering the targeted traffic required and most had a high bounce rate.
Aw, c’mon Cow, the last time I heard, you don’t need that traffic - but yes, having it would help with the amount of referrals you raked up!
But you can’t really complain - Blogrush caught you on the 4th guideline, we talk in terms of moooney here and not plain ol’ money! Guess they thought it was a different language altogether!
Got accepted.
Those that removed the widget should put it back these week with all the coming changes. I hope it solves most “bugs” and I get more visitors.
They removed 10 000 blogs and mistake will happen. This one was bigger than most
Removing the trackback was a good thing. I’m sure that some of those 10000 were mad and the comment would had been filled by them.
It’s was nice of John Reese to comment about banned vs inactive.
Hey, I just got banned from PPP for two weeks.
I’m thinking there’s a conspiracy of sorts taking place.
I just had the same email, to be honest I am not really bothered and I have removed their widget from my site, and it will not be going back up, whether they re-approve my site or not.
I have received very little traffic from them since I installed the widget and to be honest I think it is a waste of space.
from the looks of things john reese went on a banning spree past few days, doesn’t matter tho the product was inferior and terribly planned out not bringing in close to the amount of traffic that people were giving it and that blogrush promised. Looks like a biggggg time bust to me, im glad I saw through the hype and noticed it was just a visitor exchange problem turned into a fancy widget
I have been made ‘inactive’ too. Good by to that service. It didn’t do what it claimed anyway.
They banned my collections blog, too. They gave me the same explanation….they suck.
My blog got banned too. It wasn’t giving any traffic to my blog anyway and I’m happy that I didn’t bringed a single referral.
You are so behind the times!
I got banned weeks ago for publishing a post about how to cheat their original system and why it was a waste of space.
My blogrush is inactive now.. Well I removed their code. I won’t resubmit again. Cus I never get any traffic from them.
My two other blogs have been banned too, stupid them!
I bet those reviewers went through some very rigorous training. Probably something along the lines of. “Here’s your list of 2,000 blogs. Have it done by Monday.”
I figured I’d get kicked out for low traffic, but I got approved.
Fortunately I never bothered to join. You are doing a good job Mr. Cow, but don’t get too excited about things like BlogRush and jump on board just to say you were an early adopter.
This whole thing looks like it will be embarrassing for that Reese dude.
I removed their widget a couple of weeks ago when I realized that despite me getting a few hundred actual visitors a day I only ever got 80 for last month.
I guess the hype wasn’t what it seemed at all promising a heap of targeted traffic. I have a feeling that the only one benefiting from this system are the big blogs anyway.
I also got accepted today but since I’m no longer interested It doesn’t matter.
Don’t worry Cow, you have enough traffic as it is, you don’t need the “rush”.
Did John Reese forget to mention that BlogRush is a network for humans only? No cows allowed. Join CowRush you Cows

that is beat - but who cares - blogrush is gon to be useless just like DealDotCom
Yup, Contest Blogger got banned too. What the heck dude? They did approve my other blog, http://www.romancetracker.com, I don’t know what the difference was there.
How did you guys manage to get un-banned from AdSense?
I’m better than you
Not really.
I too am very surprised that your blog didn’t meet the criteria of a “high-quality” blog.
I was about to sign up for Blogrush under the cow, but when the cow will be banned after 1000 referrals, I don’t want to be 1001 to make things worse…
What about we start Blogpush? That’s quite unique and merely original! And we agree we don’t bann ourselves
haha, thats hilarious considering who you referred. I think they just lost credibilityand need to apologize and reinstate you.
its not that big a deal i doubt they would have sent you any worth while traffic.
i think this post and controversy has sent you more traffic then they ever wil.
BlogRush sucks. Their ‘review’ last about 2 seconds and that’s it. If they see ads, you’re out. It’s that simple.
@Mr-Cow– Yeah, I would really like to know how you got un-banned from adsense?
My blog was put inactive as well and I don’t think it was fair at all. (the post is in my link above).
I put ‘banned’ in my blog post as well because that’s really what it feels like since I can’t get back in until Nov.21 and can’t log into my account anymore.
Conclusion : they see ads and your blog is out of the map
ahahahha Blog rush is dead
It couldn’t be ads. I have ads on my blog and it was approved.
Just today I got email from them too, happily announcing that they have banned 10k blogs who have not met the guidelines of quality. They also said we will not notice a “HUGE” difference in quality of the link s appearing in the widget. I am amazed you cows “did not meet the high blogging standard”
Keep working, you might eventually be worthy of that widget (that btw does not bring any traffic anyway).
Funny! My Blog wasn´t banned and it´s only one month old, hasn´t any HIGH quality content, but it´s in English
Most funny thing is “[...]SOME people are upset that their accounts were made inactive.[...]” versus “ONE Response to ´BlogRush Quality Audit Complete’”, they are really closing their comments very fast…
Best Regards!
I don’t think being “unaccepted” by BlogRush has anything to do with ads. I have seen 100s of blogs with flashing advertisements splashed all over the site who apparently met the, uh, so-called quality guidelines. And to be quite honest some of those blogs are udder, pun intended, crap. I had the code installed for one week, referred 30+ people and I was still banned. Yes I will use the term banned because if I don’t conform to what they deem acceptable, I’m not worthy. Forget it. In the long run BlogRush will be like every other traffic-generating site- a group of the same blogs rotating over and over.
Our blog was banned as well.
This might be because we removed the BlogRush widget from our site a few weeks back, though.
hahahaha i didn’t get banned, true animals dont, dumb cows!
i am just playing i hope you win the fight too, get some reese’s pieces!
I never understood the purpose of using Blogrush…seems like a waste to me.
Strangely my measly little blog has been accepted!!
And I think you referred me!
I hope that they do accept you, it’s obvious your blog is genuine and helpful to many.
Nobody really know why a blog is “ban” or not since their guidelines are not clear at all… however a strong anti-blogrush begins around the blogsphere…
http://www.blackysky.com/blog/2007/10/22/blogrush-is-a-scam-because-they-could-not-deliver-results/
Wow, that stinks. A lot. I just recently heard about a decent blog being blocked from another site like this. Seems to be going on a lot lately. I’ll Stumble this post and what not.
xD omg lol how you could be banned? I approve the selection….may be they hates cows?
Glad I never signed up for this then.