Blogcatalog An open letter to you

by John Sullivan on September 18, 2009 · 18 comments

in bloggers, blogging, blogging tips, san antonio, san antonio blogs, social media

Who is Timethief ?
san antonio blogs

The site blogcatalog started out as a directory and was sold  for 40 k about 3 years ago to people that live here in San Antonio where I do. When I got into blogging it was very exciting to me that this awesome site was less then 3 miles away from me. I immediately called and reached out to the owner. I was looking for friendship because we are the same age. I have known many successful people in my life and I was all for finally meeting someone on the cutting edge right here in San Antonio because this town lacks such. So we talked and the spark began. I would spend time on the site doing what I THOUGHT the site was meant for. The site doesn’t let you drop links, it’s always a waste of time trying to get people to visit your site. On one hand I had this guy that at the time I liked and a site that I didn’t. There is a notorious loser wannabe blogger on there that goes by the name Timethief. Never in my life have I seen so many people be negatively affected by one person. I did a little research VERY LITTLE googled timethief and saw a trail of an agenda. She was on wordpress forums for a while trying to convince people of her VALUE as a blogging tips guru etc when people who are smart realized that isn’t  what she is really about. She wanted to get a paid moderators job and felt entitled because of all the HELP she gave out on the forum. But people at wordpress aren’t stupid and they said NO thanks. So she showed her real colors and they BANNED her ass. When she was passed over for the position she came and said I’d like to retract my application

” I didn’t want the job anyway” Now she was off to Blogcatalog. Right off the bat tons of people didn’t like her.

Blogcatalog USED to have 100’s of cool real bloggers hanging out having fun that doesn’t happen now because of one person. No two people Timethief and the owner. I know they don’t like her but they wanted to keep her around because she acted like a FORUM COP aka FREE moderator. So then began the legacy of Timethief on Blogcatalog. I had them delete my account and watched from the side. The main reason I watched is because I wanted to learn what works and what doesn’t and I couldn’t figure out why they would let one person kill their site.

Bloggers need a cool place to mingle without a doubt.

I don’t hate anyone and I would of liked if things turned out different but I don’t suck up to anyone. I’m not going to play kissass on some forum to get a little traffic. Now with the sites toolbar the people get even less visitors. So over the time I just kept blogging.

Many of the cool people I met back then I still stay in contact with. Even when I first quit and people would CONStantly email me stuff about Timethief or this and that I never told anyone NOT to join blogcatalog. In fact over the time I would actually email Tony some honest emails saying man your site is dying don’t you see it and recommend he take action. I would be seen as some clown and what did I know. Well now I see the site is literally in big trouble and I don’t mean just another round of good people leaving because I have seen that a few times. I mean it’s like watching a funeral and who’s right in the middle ? You guessed it Timethief. Imagine having a friend that  once you decided not to give them a job turn around and drive your bussiness right into the ground. As someone who monitors social networking sites I have seen them come and GO.

So here’s the point unlike this GOOF I’m not a hater and I’m asking you if your a member of blogcatalog to go and try to resurrect the site. See just because you let me down and show what your really about I come from a place where we look out for each other and no one is perfect.

So my final advice to the staff at blogcatalog is to clean house you have 3 members on your site that are like CANCER and they won’t stop until your site is  dead. They don’t click ads so what do you care. I would delete and permenantly BAN These members. Timethief, CRPITT, Melinda.

Now I will publicly state a failure to do so will result in your being the next pijoo :)

Be sad to invest 40 g’s make it go to millions to go back to 40g’s :)

Disclaimer Yes I’m working on a site that will not only be in direct competition with Blogcatalog it will be better because we will take care of bloggers and not screw them ENOUGH SAID.

Good luck your going to need it :)

Karma’s a mother fucker sometimes

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extremejohn (extremejohn)
September 18, 2009 at 1:28 pm
potpolitics (John Sullivan)
September 18, 2009 at 2:17 pm
Advertising with Controversy
October 2, 2009 at 7:48 am

{ 15 comments… read them below or add one }

1 John Sullivan
Twitter: jsinkeywest
(440 comments)
September 18, 2009 at 2:16 am

Timethief must be one of my subscribers :)
Vancouver, British Columbia arrived on “POTPOLITICS | We SMOKE our Competition”
within minutes of this post the shit bag comes :)
John Sullivan´s last blog ..Did you GET Folk’d today ? My ComLuv Profile

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2 Blaine Bullman (6 comments) September 18, 2009 at 9:32 am

We bloggers do need a cool place to hang out where people like that are kept to 0. I have heard a number of times people leaving blogcatalog. Im a member of blogcatalog but I don’t really ever go there and it definitely isn’t a community I would say WOW and want to stay.

Something needs to change there. Im exciting to see what you’re cooking up John to compete against blogcatalog.
Blaine Bullman´s last blog ..6 Benefits Of Social Networking My ComLuv Profile

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3 John (22 comments) September 18, 2009 at 11:23 am

I tried joining about 2 years ago when I started my blogs. It was ok at first, got some decent links out of it and met 1 or 2 interesting people. I even tried to upgrade to a premium listing but some kind of error wouldn’t complete the process. ($7 had to be too good to be true anyway)

But when I tried to get involved in on-site discussions it was miserable. Every other post was some lame blog post and a guy begging for Diggs and Stumbles. No one was making a community, they were just trying to rig the existing ones!

So I tried to just forget about it, but then it kept popping up in Copyscape. I had to switch my feed to “excerpts” but then the excerpts came up in Copyscape. Eventually I deleted my blogs from BlogCatalog and my traffic has been a little better since then. At least they don’t outrank me for my own post titles anymore!
John´s last blog ..Bluehost vs Hostgator My ComLuv Profile

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4 Extreme John from Blogging CEO
Twitter: extremejohn
(86 comments)
September 18, 2009 at 1:25 pm

Bro you need to move on and move the energy with you, if they want to be shit bags let them be shit bags.

Ok honestly Im glad your calling them out, I just try to play the nice guy once and a while.

Let’s knock’em down and pick the bodies up later.
Extreme John@Blogging CEO´s last blog ..3 Ways to Increase Your Alexa Ranking My ComLuv Profile

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5 John Sullivan
Twitter: jsinkeywest
(440 comments)
September 19, 2009 at 7:33 am
6 Brian D. Hawkins
Twitter: ExtremeEzine
(28 comments)
September 19, 2009 at 1:09 pm

I’m looking forward to your site John, the only other real option to Blogcatalog is MyBlogLog and even though they’re run by Yahoo they suck big time. I have thumbs that haven’t been updated for a frigin’ year. Don’t even get me started with entrecard, they’re a joke. It would be nice to have a membership site for bloggers that’s for the members.
Brian D. Hawkins´s last blog ..All Things Must Come To An End – It Is A Sad Day For My Domain Portfolio – This Must Be The Longest Blog Post Title Ever – Seriously It Is My ComLuv Profile

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7 christie (5 comments) September 19, 2009 at 3:16 pm

Hah – that’s exactly why I stopped bothering with BlogCatalog last fall (when I had two other blogs). Timethief! My gosh when people would start talking in a discussion, there she was interrupting with her rule book. Get a life already!
christie´s last blog ..MiscBytes unusual niche of the month My ComLuv Profile

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8 John Sullivan
Twitter: jsinkeywest
(440 comments)
September 19, 2009 at 3:58 pm

@christie: The owner is a desperate GOOF to let that scumbag RUN his site
I see she is back roaming wordpress forums MAN she is straight up poison
She is actually helping me defeat them and they don’t even realize it.
Anyway I guess it all works out the way it should in the end
Also you are just one of thousands 1000’s that have left for 1 person ;)
oh well we have work to do and no sense looking back at a bunch of LOSERS LOL
thanks for stopping by

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9 Sell Your Mobile (3 comments) September 20, 2009 at 5:56 am

Interesting post. I use BC. It brings me some traffic and backlinks. But that’s about it. They upgraded me for a month on my Birthday. I’m wondering if I change the date of my birth in my account settings to tomorow will I get another month of free upgrade but you don’t get much. A little badge, no ads oh and access to some stats like analytics isn’t good enough they give you get clicky LOL.

Roll on your new site John. Lookin forward to it.

Mike
Sell Your Mobile´s last blog ..The Best Mobile Phone Recyclers To Sell Your Mobile Phone My ComLuv Profile

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10 Jeunelle Foster (13 comments) September 20, 2009 at 3:24 pm

When I took a peek at you live traffic feed I can see you had a early visitor.

I was laughing at all those pathetic comments today on some of the last drama lama discussions at BC “We are Missing a lot of people – has anyone else noticed?” (now deleted) and even that other stupid pitiful discussion on “Is peace the absence of war”? and how hurt “she” is.

Another ploy to get sympathy from the community after all the fucking shit she’s been getting away with over there. The only thing she truly needs is the absence of my foot up her ass.

I am disappointed in the Owners because I had hope for both of them but they should have known better.

Especially after I took the time to give them enough light so that they could see where the trouble was truly coming from and why members where getting upset with this one individual but they are practically spiritually blind. That makes me sad because I was just starting to like them both.

They are pissed off at me because they can’t handle the truth and I fed them a strong dose of truth on my blog. What a bunch of pathetic losers just like the friggin maggot who they keep feeding.

I can’t say that I miss the place as I am progressing on other more promising networks where it truly counts, so they can kiss my ass.

Can’t wait to check out your new site John, lot’s of luck with it. I’m sure it will be an improvement to that other network I left behind in the dust.
Jeunelle Foster´s last blog ..Harassment and the ridiculous BlogCatalog blocked feature My ComLuv Profile

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11 Andy Beard (2 comments) September 20, 2009 at 7:34 pm

I am not going to comment about the community aspects of Blogcatalog, it is something I have personally never had a huge amount of time for, and stated that even when it was first introduced, especially as my wife works, and I look after the 2 year old a lot of the time.

I would like to comment on the toolbar and Blogcatalog ranking for your posts.

Blogcatalog only uses very small snippets of your content.
You would be amazed at the number of sites that take advantage of BC for parasite SEO – very focused content which when combined as a page of snippets for targeted tags can send significant traffic to a site that on its own wouldn’t stand a chance of ranking, especially with it’s own tag pages.

I am personally in 2 minds about iframe toolbars

When Digg introduced theirs, the first thing I did was add a plugin to break iframes… that is an easy option for any blogger, and you can just add a little javascript to do it on Blogspot.
Not just Digg, but also Stumbleupon, and there are very few bloggers on Blogcatalog who complain about Stumbleupon traffic, framed or not.

But what about juice?

First of all Blogcatalog from memory has never passed juice to article links, and that is still the case. Now they have a nofollow, plus the page is opened using an onclick event anyway which might take priority, and kill any juice dead.
That is good – it shows they are not trying to rank the iframes.

I have argued the case to have nofollow/onclick removed from primary blog links, as was the case for a while in 2007/2008.

The iframes themselves generally won’t rank unless you or someone else forces them to.

http://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Ahttp%3A%2F%2Fwww.blogcatalog.com%2Fblog%2F&pws=0&gl=US

Just over 6000 have been indexed and I should probably nag Tony about sticking noindex on the frames again, though it seems like most of the ones ranking has been done deliberately by a blog owner (parasite SEO)
In some ways there is a benefit for BC and other bloggers, as a visitor to one of those iframes could potentially click to browse more blogs.

One of the major things to note with anything to do with Blogcatalog and SEO is that they don’t require links, and they are not sneaky with links.

I just got around to re-adding the primary widget to my home page, and there are no included backlinks.
There never have been.

I don’t know any other “blog network” or “blog search engine” that doesn’t try in some way to sneak in a little juice grab, including those on your sidebar.
(note: the static HTML version for WP.com blogs does have links)

Bloggers asked for the ability to claim with meta tags, and it was provided.

So if bloggers aren’t being asked to give anything in the way of juice (and it would be impossible to police effectively) then it wouldn’t really be fair to hold Blogcatalog accountable for the way they link back to you.

I advise Blogcatalog on SEO stuff, but that doesn’t mean they do everything I suggest… far from it – they still have a long “laundy list” to work through just form me.

One of the things to understand is that they are a bootstrapped startup in many ways, and they have had a few rocky moments over the last 2 1/2 years – they haven’t got massive pools of VC capital to burn – Tony is running a very lean ship.

Good luck on the Dofollow blogs directory – I know from direct experience how much time will be involved in policing it.
Andy Beard´s last blog ..Feedburner Feedsmith WP2.8.4 & Caching My ComLuv Profile

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12 John Sullivan
Twitter: jsinkeywest
(440 comments)
September 20, 2009 at 10:13 pm

@Andy Beard: Andy I consider it a HONOR that you have stopped by and commented :)
Because I live 3 miles away there was some personal aspects to the COMMUNITY :)
But Tony is not the only person on the planet that is going to look out for themselves ONLY.
The links, toolbars keeping TOXIC members because they act like free mods.
there’s a LONG LIST of consistent moves on BC’s part that they DON’T have Bloggers first as their mission
that is where I will beat them in the end :) Thanks so much
Really the site is useless unless you like idiotic chit chat/ or to have THEM outrank you for your own keywords
Every time I LEFT that site my life got BETTER :)

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13 Andy Beard (2 comments) September 21, 2009 at 11:13 am

I am 100% sure Blogcatalog’s #1 priority is to remain a viable business despite the worldwide financial & advertising crisis.
But I am a business guy, that is something I respect – they have to feed their families.

As I stated if you don’t like the toolbars, you can use a breakout script.

The outranking for keywords is a fallacy.
For an exact search on a title Blogcatalog will very rarely rank for it, because other than those 6000 pages I highlighted, they don’t have pages created that use your title.

On the other hand many other blogging services do create titles based upon your titles.

Twitter does, because the tweet is used in the title tag
Technorati creates a page with quite a large snippet
http://technorati.com/posts/30Hrr5NZdG2nGUJM0pgwo68XZ3Gj3SVIHlsgUgIbhEc%3D

NetworkBlogs has the same amount of your content as Blogcatalog would, and also doesn’t give you links.
http://networkedblogs.com/blog/potpolitics_on_the_cutting_edge_of_all_social_media/

They must have some criteria to get followed links, as my profile there seems to be all dofollow.

I don’t know what financial benefit they gain from Bloggers Unite – it is a good cause and takes up resources. There are some SEO benefits but they are subtle and about as whitehat as you can get.

If Blogcatalog added the toolbar to somehow game traffic stats don’t you think they would have included their Quantcast code in the toolbar pages?

I really just want to avoid the community aspects of the conversation. As I have never really taken part it wouldn’t be fair for me to comment.

I do know that tons of people have discovered my blogs over time through Blogcatalog, and the challenge for a blogger is to convert bloggers in their niche into subscribers and link partners.
Andy Beard´s last blog ..Feedburner Feedsmith WP2.8.4 & Caching My ComLuv Profile

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14 Print Postcards | UPrinting.com (1 comments) September 24, 2009 at 8:45 pm

I’ve been in blogcatalog for a while also and I am sad on what’s happening there. That’s really sad!

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15 Jeunelle Foster (13 comments) October 11, 2009 at 1:46 pm

Breaking News – News Flash

Ding Dong the witch is Dead.

Looks like the BC Owners finally seen the light and officially Banned that heifer for good off BC.

This news just made my MFD. Thank you Jesus
Jeunelle Foster´s last blog ..Harassment and the ridiculous BlogCatalog blocked feature My ComLuv Profile

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