I love that you thought well enough of this blog to give it an award! I am truly grateful and I appreciate it SO much!
I accept it, but I love breaking the rules too ;P So while I may not fulfill all the award requirements, this is my appreciation note and a link out to you! ; ) Thank you!

Thank you my lovelies!

More about User Generated Blog Awards

“There are no WordPress.com sponsored awards. They are all blogger generated backlink meme schemes. A blog meme is a viral game where you generate links and relationships through asking other bloggers to participate. There are many blog awards and all are memes resembling chain letters designed to get backlinks under the guise of blog awards.” – directly quoted from timethief on wordpress support forum

These awards seem to have propagated in the last five years. And because they have been forwarded and reforwarded sometimes not in their entirety, the original creators of the award have been lost through the process. Except for a few, I could not easily trace back the origins of these awards.

Awards such as the WordPress family award, Versatile Blogging Award, Loyal Reader Award, ABC (awesome blog content) and the Best Moment award are user-generated. They are not recognised awards like The Weblog Awards or other official awards presented by known blog advertising networks or other corporate sponsors, which generally select winners by Internet voting (popularity contest!).

And because these are user-generated and user-distributed, what they mean or how significant they are is really down to the individual and how much meaning they give to the award. If you think of them as gold stars given out to children, then they are. For myself, I like to think that the giver has given due thought to the nominations, and that is what I have tried to do on my end as well. In a kinder society, an award given to me by each individual reader because they think the blog deserves it, (or in the case of the loyal reader award that the reader deserves a shoutout for being so awesome as to spend so much time on their blog), would mean so much more than an official popularity contest. Which recognised blog award awards readers anyway??? Hah!

Some bloggers have a no awards policy for the following reasons:
– it does not fall in line nicely with the content of their blog and will stick out like a sore thumb
– if you receive and repost one, you may feel obliged to receive and repost all to be fair
– linking to a lower ranking/quality blogs that awarded them will affect the SEO scores of the higher ranking blog

So yes, give it due consideration what is the best way for you to approach it.

Some people graciously accept and do nothing to propagate it further. That is fine as well. There are bloggers, who pay it forward in their own way. Sonel is a wonderful example who explained in her no awards post that she preferred to spend her time visiting blogs and leaving very meaningful comments rather than writing an awards post. And she does that too!

Out of all the few awards that I have received and given out so far, I do feel that the Versatile Blogger Award deserves a shoutout at least. The creator is the only one I find who has been acting in a “sponsor” role. i.e. he built and is still maintaining a blog dedicated to the award, and regularly reblogs and publicises those blogs that pinged him and which caught his interest. The rest of the awards are really just – I made this, go forth and propagate and back link to my site please type of awards (which I suspect is why the backlinks were removed along the way making it difficult to trace back to the original creator.)