BlogRush - The Mighty “Phase 2″
BlogRush is about to implement a ton of changes and they're not even a month old. It's nice to see such quick action to make improvements, I know they really got slammed when they first came out since every other blogger posted an announcement with their referral links trying to get a leg up on the referrals (nothing wrong with that!). You can read about the improvements on John Reese's blog. A few of the big ones are copied below.
- Per Post Statistics & Addition Of “Buzz Meter”
Now you’ll be able to see how many times each of your posts is syndicated across the network and how many people clicked to read that individual post.
- Bonus Syndication For All Users, But Weighted Towards Low-Traffic Members
All members of our network will be receiving bonus syndication but we’ll be giving more bonus credits to our members that need it most — ones with low-traffic.
- Improved Security & Abuse Measures (We’ve already squashed 95% of the cheaters!)
We’ll be rolling out improved security measures, but we’re happy to report that we’ve eliminated about 95% of the cheaters in our network. We’re sure to continue to get a few new ones ‘trying’ from time to time, but we’ll work hard to zap them as quickly as possible.
- 100% Manual Review & New Quality Guidelines
We’ve already launched our Manual Review process… all new users as of today (and for good) will have their blogs manually reviewed BEFORE the widget will even load on their pages. Their posts will not be syndicated across the network until they are APPROVED and meet our Quality Guidelines. If they are not approved the widget will not load on their pages and none of their content will ever be syndicated on the network.
We’re almost finished with manually reviewing all the existing blogs in our network. We should be done with this massive ‘audit’ within about 7 days.
As soon as we complete this full audit there will be a MAJOR SWEEP of our entire network. All the blogs that don’t meet our quality criteria will be REMOVED from our network.
Say goodbye to all the non-English blogs, junk blogs, and any low-quality blogs you may have seen from time-to-time in the widget. (I love this one)
Possible Google PR update soon
For those of you who still care about page rank, there's a lot of speculation of a page rank update coming soon. There's a link in the article to this Digital Point thread where a lot of people are seeing their backlinks disappear. I've noticed this too lately. One of my PR4 sites had a couple hundred backlinks last I checked and now it's down to 1. The traffic hasn't changed though so I'm not worried about it.
My previous post mentioned app killers and I read another article today title "Where's the Apple iKiller?" This "<app name> killer" linkbait is starting to get old. :\
Google testing fresh content searching
Domain age and page rank may become less relevant to some if Google's time-specific search becomes popular. It lets you narrow search results by age. Instead of getting the same old search results every time, you can specify how fresh you want the content to be. This is something I would like to see become popular alongside the current method because searching for current events will no longer give me a bunch of irrelevant sites. Of course the old method of searching won't be going anywhere since information doesn't have to be new to be relevant, but having the option is definitely nice. It may also create a new niche of fresh content by people whose blogs are too new to get Se traffic the old way.
Do follow, don’t follow
Nofollow tags have been popping up a lot as a discussion topic lately. A guest poster at Shoemoney talks about how it's good to use nofollow tags internally to improve SEO for your site. At the same time, many bloggers, like Randa Clay 
point out that the nofollow attribute discourages participation in blogs. This all seems like a complete 180 from the way people thought about the nofollow tag when it came out. Anyway, I removed the tag from the comments section of this blog because it's never served a real purpose to me. I have other blogs with the nofollow tag in place that still get spammed out to wazoo. All things being equal, I'd rather share the link juice with contributors than to clam up just to discourage spamming which will always happen anyway.
Seasonal content
If you have a website that has seasonal content, now is the time to roll out your fall stuff. I've recently started adding Halloween and Fall content to one of my sites and it's beginning to get SE traffic already. Between now and the holidays, traffic will only increase so now is the time to get a jump on things.
Black hat white hat jargon
Everybody has their opinions on this and there are a million posts about it already so I'll keep mine short. I've never cared for the hat jargon and people who use these terms sound silly. The only purpose it's ever served is so that certain people can look down their noses and point their moralist fingers at others. I think this is the main reason I never cared for these terms. When people turn everything into ethical discussions, it turns me off because all I care about are the dry, technical aspects of how and why things work. When someone finds a new way to get targeted traffic, I'm interested in things like why it works and whether it can be applied in different situations. Whether it is against one search engines rules or another's really doesn't matter to me. I may use the new technique and I may not. Time and risk isn't always worth the reward, but I will have at least learned something new that may come in handy down the road somewhere. Black hat, white hat, gray hat, the end goal is always the same, but some paths to the goal are shorter than others.
So, my official opinion on SEO techniques and their hat color is: I don't care. I don't judge others and don't care if others judge me. (This post is for future link back reference so I don't have to explain myself if someone finds any of my methods objectionable.)