Fired: BlogRush, Fuel My Blog and even Technorati

Dec

1st

Fired: BlogRush, Fuel My Blog and even Technorati

Posted in Blogging by Douglas Karr at 7:11 pm

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Trash Today, I finally did it! I removed the Technorati badge from my sidebar – the very one that I wrote. I also removed BlogRush and FuelMyBlog’s widgets.

The simple fact is that I’m getting virtually no traffic from each of those sources. Technorati now ranks me well over 5,000 when I was approaching the 1,000 mark earlier in the year. This despite the fact that my readership is growing double-digits, but Technorati is being diluted with corporations disguising themselves as blogs. They’ve turned their back on bloggers and don’t appear to be willing to change their minds. Chow Technorati!

BlogRush has done nothing… and after listening to the recent video berating bloggers like me who are abandoning the service, I’m leaving. My BlogRush impressions are quite impressive… thousands of impressions with no click-throughs. I even defended BlogRush when it was first released and I was committed to sticking it through. However, the ‘exponential growth’ and ‘flood of readers’ has never come. I have 0 new readers due to BlogRush. Ba-bye BlogRush!

Fuel My Blog had a cool logo so I kept it around for a while. Again, though, no new readers. Cya FuelMyBlog!

Continuing to keep these widgets and buttons and badges and such hurts more than it helps, for several reasons:

It prolongs the death of the service, or worse, provides an indication to a larger company or investor that they are actually worth investing in or buying.
It slows down my site by having to add more crap from servers that I have no clue can handle the load or not.
It clutters my site.
It provides me no useful data regarding my site and its statistics.
It doesn’t help promote my site. When there are tens of thousands of other schmucks, there’s no spotlight for you.

Do yourself and everyone else a favor and cleanup your site! Write a post about what you threw out!

You might also find these posts interesting:

F I Ramirez

As a new blogger I must tell you: Thank you for this post!

Rob O.

I gave up on BlogRush too. It wasn't bringing in much traffic and my subscriber numbers didn't budge. But perhaps more bothersome than that was the poor "randomization" of the widget - it kept feeding me the same post feeds again and again.

Our blog is kind of streamlined to the extreme in that we have - brace yourself - no sidebars. Yup, just one column. That way, for better or worse, the content is front & center.

Ian Kallen

Hi Doug,
You do have 187 fans indicating your blog is a favorite on Technorati, see
http://technorati.com/blogs/www.douglaskarr.com?fans - maybe having Technorati widgetry on your site ain't all that bad ;)

Seriously though, I was saddened to read this when I first came across this post last week. I've been looking into various reports of rankings that've dropped, in most cases it comes down to one or more of a few simple explanations. There's the case of folks who have a handful of posts that received an unusual amount of attention and as those links age out of the 6 month window , their rank drops even as they continue to produce great posts and acquire new readership. I've found folks who were the beneficiaries of cut-and-pasted link sets from last spring's rash of viral link memes saw their ranks drop as time progressed. There are also cases where folks are unwittingly benefiting from a spammer's feed-scraped splogs or a bug in our system that was artificially inflating their links; when a correction is made those gains are reversed.

Suffice to say, you've got a great blog and I'm hoping we can continue to be of service to you and your readers. The Percolator we built is designed to highlight the things that bloggers are paying attention to and highlight the bloggers themselves, I've found some of your posts in there and I'm hoping to see more.
best,
-Ian
Technorati

Ryan

I did some more thinking and I believe I've found a better way of describing the situation.

You are looking for a large quantity of high quality click happy loose-linked readers (again, who doesn't).

The Fuel my blog community hopes that may ultimately be the result but what it really does in streamlining the process in finding OTHER blogs for you to read.

Try that one on for size!

Ryan