I recently learned about a new traffic generating system called Blog Rush. I’m usually very skeptical of such systems, but this one had some very interesting unique ideas that kept me on the hook just long enough to try it. The system is in Beta, and there have been a few hiccups more than most Beta launches, but on the whole it is working as advertised.

The Idea Behind Blog Rush

The basic idea behind Blog Rush is to create a network of similar sites and facilitate the exchange and dynamic rotation of links between these sites. Each site in the network installs a widget that lists five links to blog posts in the network. Your blog’s widget will show the links from other blogs, and your blog will be linked to from other sites’ widgets.

Blog Rush Referrals

So how does the system decide which links to show? Through an impression tracking and exchange system. Each time your blog shows the widget (1 page impression, 5 link impressions), you earn the right to have your blog linked to for one impression on someone else’s site.

Because you are creating 5 link impressions for each page impression, but only receiving one, the system has 4 extra link impressions per page impression to hand out.

For now, Blog Rush has done two main things with these extra impressions:

1. They have reserved one link impression for themselves to use for advertising and handing out bonus impressions.
2. The other three are used for rewarding referrals to the system. If you refer someone, you get an impression for every impression they earn. The same thing happens for each level of referrals, all the way down to ten “generations.” You get less and less of an impression at each level (level 10 earns you 1/8 of an impression), and the fractions add up correctly to three total impressions.

Blog Rush Inequality

There was a person who left a comment on the Blog Rush blog who was concerned about unequal impressions. His example stated that if there was someone who had 1,000 impressions vs. someone who had 100, a growing deficit of available impressions would be created. This would be true, but only if you have too few sites. As you increase the number of sites, the deficits and surpluses will tend to average out almost perfectly, especially over time. Blog Rush has already served more than 40,000,000 blog headlines, so I’m not worried about the availability of page impressions to show the link impressions I’ve earned.

Cheating on Blog Rush

The biggest problem with Blog Rush so far has been some cheating. Many bloggers have created ways to game the system by creating bad pageviews—for example, using a script to auto-load pages to earn impressions, even though no human ever sees the pages. These cheaters have sucked up impressions earned by legitimate bloggers and have nearly killed click-through rates. However, Blog Rush has switched to a manual review system for new blogs and is purging existing blogs that aren’t meeting standards, so this problem should be fixed soon.

Click Through Rates on Blog Rush

My last concern about Blog Rush will be click through rates. How many impressions will it take before someone clicks and visits my site? The last time I checked, I had nearly 300 impressions without a click. It can take over a thousand impressions to generate a click, though, so no final verdict here… The headlines you write for your blog posts will also be extremely influential on your click through rates, so write headlines that will grab attention and will be short enough to fit in the widget (7 words, 40 characters or so).

It can’t hurt, so go try Blog Rush. I have visited some blog posts that sounded interesting, so it has value for discovering new information, even if no one clicks your links. And if I’m clicking links, there’s a chance I will visit your blog some time!

You’ve been working hard on your site, posting new content regularly, playing by the rules, being a good netizen and all that good stuff. One day you decide to check and see how you are doing in Google’s index. So you type in site:yoursite.com to see how many pages have been indexed.

Oh the horror!

A large portion of your pages are listed with the phrase “Supplemental Result” next to them.

Supplemental results are just that—supplemental. Provided when the primary variants aren’t good enough, or when someone who is starving consumes all the other results and still wants more. This means that your pages aren’t going to have the optimal traffic generating characteristics that you’d hoped for.

Two Possibilities with Supplemental Results

Take a deep breath—supplemental results aren’t the end of the world. There are two main situations where supplemental results come into play:

1. Your pages are new, and Google isn’t sure about them just yet. They are in supplemental results for a while until Google integrates them into the main search index. You just have to wait for a while (2 months should be enough). This happened to over 100 of DiamondLime’s pages after I moved my site and was first indexed at the new domain name.
2. Google doesn’t like your pages as much as the alternatives. This is tougher than simply having to wait like in case #1, but again, not the end of the world. There are things you can do to get your pages to move into the main index.

Page Rehab - Getting Pages out of Supplemental Results

There are things you can do to get your pages out of supplemental results. The central point is that you have to do things that will make your pages better (or at least seem better) than the alternatives. Here is a list of things you can do to get a page out of the supplemental results, starting with the most effective:

1. Get links from other sites to the page that needs to move out of supplemental results
2. Link to the page from other pages on your site
3. Add useful content
4. Improve your on-page SEO elements.

Get Links from Other Sites

The most powerful factor for moving your site’s pages out of supplemental results is to have other web sites link directly to your pages. This deep linking tells Google that someone values your content enough to link to it, and that immediately puts you up over all the resources that aren’t linked to from external sites.

Link to the Page from Your Site

If you link to your struggling page from many varied locations on your web site, you are telling Google (and other search engines) that out of the pages on your site, you deem this particular page to be important. This is almost as effective as getting an external link. Don’t overdo it, though, or you may shake the balance of your site’s SEO up too much.

Add Useful Content

Adding to and modifying the content on your struggling page indicates to search engines that you are trying to improve the page and that this particular resource is up to date.

Improve On-page SEO Factors

Improving your page’s SEO for on-page elements (headers, titles, etc.) is like waxing your car—it’s the same old car, but it looks like it’s worth more.

Once you’ve done what you can, wait. It can take quite a while. SEO requires patience. If, though, after 6 months and two passes at improving your page, you don’t have rankings, it may be time to focus on another page targeting that term.

Best of luck getting out of the supplemental results! It is possible, I did it—as of this writing, not one of the pages indexed on my site is a supplemental result.