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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 :twisted:
  • 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?!

reese.jpg

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!

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