DISQUS

Andy Beard Traffic decreases not from search, but in other forms of ranking. As an example Iwould be much higher on the Adage150 and other ranking tables.

I don't sell pagerank, yet my site was hit.

These blog networks are interlinking, but then so is Yahoo, and so does Google.

Skitzzo It's not that Toolbar PR isn't valid, it's just that it's a snapshot from so long ago that it doesn't really matter for what happens now. However, it does show us that something happened at least when that snapshot was taken. It's like looking at a photo of someone hitting a home run. Sure it might have been 3 months ago but they still hit the home run.

As long as Toolbar PR is the only public measure we have from Google, it's going to continue to matter. By drastically dropping the PR of these high profile sites, Google is just asking to be hated.

Andy Beard I currently don't have my Bumpzee widget switched on, I should do that now, it is only turned off because they had some performance issues.

Stories on Bumpzee have appeared all the time from sites I wouldn't choose to link to and there was no way to block them.

If I included a Digg widget containing my Digg Friends submissions, I doubt I would be interested in more than 10% of them myself, or even if 10% of them would be relevant.

For a long time I was showing a feed from my Technorati Favorites, and I was reciprocating favorites as a way for my readers to share their content with me.
Unfortunately Technorati was still only showing the highest rated blogs in the feed.

I have also used The Good Blogs, that doesn't give you any control over which articles are shown, and from what I remember it didn't allow me to block URLs or keywords.

If you have problems with sharing content that is in some way related to your audience from unknown sources, don't include any widgets other than something like Google Reader sharing, but I have ethical problems with Google Reader not supporting a way to prevent sharing, despite all my own content being published under GPL.

Andy Beard No, that means I am endorsing the widget as a viable syndication widget for blogs to maybe get more exposure.

If I was syndicating a feed from the best SEO blogs and included Matt Cutts from Google among that essential reading, that doesn't mean when he writes about paid links that I agree with his opinion.

I had someone from one of Blogrush's competitors drop a link in my comments yesterday with a challenge claiming they are going to give blog owners more traffic than Blogrush, or pay them $10.

I almost deleted it as self promotional comment spam, because I saw almost exactly the same comment posted on 20 different blogs, it was as if they were just working their way down a search result and using copy/paste.

I have left it only because I don't mind differing opinions, but they claimed that they will send me more traffic without any information on their site to determine how they plan to send me 700+ new targeted visitors without counting my referral credits.
They also claimed that Blogrush was purely a pyramid scheme, but based on my diagrams it is not.

How is othersonline planning to send me traffic when in 8 months they haven't managed to generate any of their own.
I don't really trust Alexa stats or Compete, and Compete might have a few additional bugs, but just look at the difference between my low traffic blog and Othersonline