Pandia tests Blogrush, the new way to syndicate content on blogs around the Web. We also present selected headlines from search oriented blogs and web sites.

From time to time there comes an innovation that makes everyone stop up and say: “Hm. Why didn’t I think of that?” Then you realize that the innovation isn’t that radical at all, just another variation of an old theme (in this case the banner exchanges of the 1990’s).

Blogrush is such an invention. All over the Web bloggers are entering Blogrush code into their templates, eagerly waiting for more relevant traffic. A lot of it, preferably.

It goes like this:

Bloggers and web site owners are asked to add a widget to their webpages that present a selection of links to other blog posts plus a link to the Blogrush service itself.

Every time one of your pages show the widget you get a credit, which then leads to your blog post headlines being shown on another site.

This will, hopefully, lead to traffic from those other members of the Blogrush network. This is also related traffic, as your links are delivered to sites of the same category as your own. On top of that they use their own proprietary content matching technology to identify related sites.

It doesn’t stop there. Blogrush functions as a kind of pyramid scheme. If one of your readers sign up for Blogrush after having clicked on the relevant link on a kink on your blog, any Blogrush exposure on his or her site will give you extra credits. If anyone signs up after having clicked on his or her links, that will also bring you additional traffic and so on for ten tiers. Needless to say, it helps to sign up early.

It is just hype, some say. Ben Cook argues that signing up via an affiliate link, means that you will have to share your credits with the site that led you to Blogrush, which is not a good thing. (Note: The links in this article are not affiliate links).

Andy Beal reports that Blogrush has already got a large spam problem, leading them to implement a manual review process in order to weed out low quality blogs. Cheaters will be removed, Blogrush says.

Mashable argues that the system can be easily abused, and that the widget will lead to even slower loading pages. However, on the positive side they say that “As far as we can see, BlogRush widgets do not give pagerank, so they will not hurt your blog in Google’s eyes.”

Actually, the position of Google is not totally clear. On the one hand these links are javascript generated, and Google does not follow such links. This means that they should have no effect on PageRank and search engine rankings. This is a traffic building pyramid and not a link building scheme, so Google shouldn’t care.

However, some responses from Google may indicate that they are worried about the effect Blogrush may have on the AdSense program. They do not “recommend the use of any program that artificially drives traffic to your site.”

Still, we doubt that Google will punish Blogrush participants. After all, the traffic generated by Blogrush is made by real people clicking on interesting links. We cannot end up with a World Wide Web where Google starts penalizing sites for getting relevant traffic.

John Reese of Income.com, the people behind Blogrush, says that Blogrush had served 40 million headlines on its fifth day of operation (September 20). They will now add more categories to the service and and widgets in different colors.

Pandia will try it out, and we will come back to you with a report in a week or two.

Recent search engine headlines from around the world:

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Google Rolls Out New Webmaster Tools Features
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Yahoo to launch Facebook, MySpace-killer
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Yahoo MapMixer & Shop By Color
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Google Webmaster Central: Duplicate Content Is Due to URL Parameters
When two identical content of two different URLs are crawled by search spider, there may be several negative effects (Unofficial SEO Sep 13 2007)

Microsoft Live Search 2.0 Launching This Month
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Crazy Questions at Google Job Interview
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What we're trying to do is to get more pages indexed, by reducing the share of your site's PageRank that flows to less important pages. (Dan Thies Sept 7 2007)