How to Exploit Blogrush
As soon as Blogrush came out I thought of a very obvious way you could exploit it. Since the amount of times your blog headlines are shown on other widgets relies on the amount of impressions you get on your blog (with your widget) this can be very easily faked.
All you have to do is simply use the Firefox refresher. This was also used alot to cheat YouTube videos to the front page (which I managed a few times). If you’re unaware of this tool, basically it’s a Firefox extension that you can enable to automatically refresh pages.
With the use of multiple tabs this tool could get your YouTube videos alot of views, very quickly. And of course the same principle can be used to exploit Blorgush. All you would need to do is place your widget on your blog, open multiple tabs with your blog open and enable the tool to refresh every 5 seconds. You could literally get thousands of impressions in no time.
I’m not saying this is a good idea as you may get banned, but you can see how easy it is to cheat yourself alot of traffic with Blogrush. I can’t see how they are going to counteract things like this.
You can also make an another page that has an META refresh and iframe your site. That way, you can ask your friends to do it too w/o having to install anything.
Personally, I don’t think BlogRush is going to bring in much traffic either way.
Wow.
Nice Exploit
Interesting idea but I suspect they’ll catch on pretty quickly if you do it too much.
Nice idea, but I’m sure Blogrush has already thought of this and, since it’s about the easiest thing to detect, they’ll have no problem sorting out valid impressions. Also, if your CTR is anything like the guy at problogger, it wouldn’t be worth the time. He got 35 clicks from 70,000 impressions.
http://www.problogger.net/archives/2007/09/19/what-are-your-blogrush-statistics-like/
I assume they will be forced to redo their coding.
35 clicks from 70,000 impressions. Wow, not good.
Nice thought at first, there is always a way to “fool” the new programs that fly onto the net, before beta is done.