Back on September 17th, I wrote about BlogRush after reading about it on several blogs. I put the widget on my sidebar and started getting some traffic from it.

About a week and half later, I wrote a sponsored post titled "Join BlogRush and Get Traffic!" That was nearly a month ago. Since that day, I've watched the traffic from it dwindle to less that 11 inbound clicks in the last 30 days. It appears the only time I got a lot of traffic from the widget was when I talked about BlogRush.

You might think I have no room to complain, the traffic being free and all that. If you do, well, you're both right and you're wrong. It's free traffic, yes, but it does come at a cost. It's a JavaScript widget, one of the kinds that are notoriously slow at times. It also takes up room in the sidebar and doesn't look that great, even with the extra "flavors". It may be as much of a turn-off, or even more, than other advertising widgets.

The part that really irritates me about BlogRush is not the traffic, or lack of it. It's about their new quality guidelines. I won't mention one of the blogs that was removed from BlogRush because it failed to meet their guidelines (it's coming up in another "Link Frenzy" post), but I will say that it's a blog that I read frequently and I can't see the method behind their madness. That blog is basically no different than my own in terms of each "rule" and I received an email message from them that my blog met their "strict" quality guidelines.

At this point in time, I'm considering removing it, for all of the above reasons.