BlogRush Under Spammers Attack?

If you login into your BlogRush account your can see following message at the bottom of dashboard:

IMPORTANT MESSAGE: Click- through rates are very low right now due to problems with some users cheating the system. We are a few days away from removing all abuse from the system and you will see your click-rates increase. We are also moving to a Manual Review Process for all member blogs which will also increase the traffic you receive. Thank you for your patience — we’re working hard to improve this beta version of our service.

Seems like BlogRush experiencing troubles with spammers abusing their system. Also I’ve got this email from them:

We’re about 5 days into the launch of BlogRush and its growth has been nothing short of EXPLOSIVE. We’ve served over 40 MILLION blog headlines (i.e. blog post titles and links to the full post.) And each day that passes is serving more than the previous day — it’s truly growing virally.

By now you’ve probably seen write-ups and discussion about BlogRush all over blogs, discussion forums, and in email newsletters. Many have raved about the service while others have been very critical of it. We certainly welcome ALL criticism and feedback, good or bad. It’s the only way we will be able to improve the service to help our users generate more targeted traffic to their blogs.

Now I Know How Google Feels

Unfortunately, the bozos have come out of the woodwork and are trying to cheat the BlogRush system. We have quite a few users that are abusing the system — from running scripts to auto-load the widget, to other fraudulent methods to earn syndication credits for their account that they do not deserve.

These ‘cheaters’ are hurting the overall network and dramatically lowering the click-through rates for our good users. It’s obvious since their “impressions” are not even seen by humans and therefore are not sending any traffic to other users.

There have also been concerns about the QUALITY of blogs in the BlogRush network. Some poor quality blogs (I wouldn’t even call them blogs.. more like pages of junk and ads) have been added to BlogRush and it’s creating a problem.

What We’re Doing About These Issues

1. We’re moving to a MANUAL REVIEW process. No more automation. We will be reviewing ALL blogs submitted to BlogRush. If the quality of the blog is poor, they will not be allowed to participate. We’re going to start reviewing ALL the blogs that are currently in our network and will be disabling the accounts for poor quality blogs.

2. We’re continuing to add security measures to our system and we will be mass-removing any and all cheaters that we discover. We will not rest until the cheaters are WIPED OUT and kept from abusing our network. The manual review process will help eliminate most of them as legitimate bloggers that have put in the time to create a decent blog aren’t the types that are going to be abusing the system.

All of these changes will only benefit our users — it wil increase their click-through rates and drive more traffic to their blogs. It will also make sure that the blogs their widget links to are only quality blogs.

For everyone that has signed up for an account and has been testing BlogRush on their blog, thank you for your patience. Please know that we are working as quickly as possible to improve the service.

Hope they will overcome all problems.