John Chow stops ranking for John Chow on Google

I think his rankings have been dropping so much lately is because he has been doing his whole “Make money online” blog review thing for far too long (everybody’s been telling him to stop in the comments for some time now). What he was doing was basically Google bombing. Tons of links in short time + same anchor text = good rankings for now, but penalties galore later on.

I think that he over reacted with reciprocal link network.
He asked for links, and then link back.

Lots of unrelated reciprocals and there’s a trouble.

He likes to push things to the limit and this time Google pushed back. If you go by Google’s guidelines then he is screwed and deserved to be penalized

Looks like his ranking might be coming back… when I wrote the last comment he was nowhere in sight, but now johnchow.com is back up to #70 or so for his name.

John Chow rocks!

Despite being Google-bombed, somehow I know John will land on his feet.

Paula

The guy charges people to remove ‘nofollow’ from his comments, no wonder google hit him!

It’s not Google bombing, because he have the phrase “make money online” all over his blog. I think “spamdexing” should be the right term for it.

This is what Matt Cutts said about directories in his post on paid links, I simply changed the word directory for blog.

Q: Hey, as long as we’re talking about blogs, can you talk about the role of blogs, some of whom charge for a reviewer to evaluate them?
A: I’ll try to give a few rules of thumb to think about when looking at a blog. When considering submitting to a blog, I’d ask questions like:
- Does the blog reject urls? If every url passes a review, the blog gets closer to just a list of links or a free-for-all link site.

John Chow doesn’t post advertisements for prescription drugs or various adult industries. Since these are a large part of the online marketplace I’m positive people have attempted to have him blog/link to their sites and he has refused.

- What is the quality of urls in the blog? Suppose a site rejects 25% of submissions, but the urls that are accepted/listed are still quite low-quality or spammy. That doesn’t speak well to the quality of the blog.

After going to several of the sites listed at John Chow’s site feel they are decent quality sites. The review he offers is significantly better then virtually any directory on the net.

- If there is a fee, what’s the purpose of the fee? For a high-quality blog, the fee is primarily for the time/effort for someone to do a genuine evaluation of a url or site.

The fee he charges is obviously for the time it takes to write a one to two page indepth, researched article.

Those are a few factors I’d consider. If you put on your user hat and ask ‘Does this seem like a high-quality blog to me?’ you can usually get a pretty good sense as well, or ask a few friends for their take on a particular blog.

So do you guys think that John Chow’s blog qualifies as a high-quality blog?

A reinclusion request only works if your site has been banned. I’m not banned and no one tells Google where you should rank.

Great post! Good job.

That’s why it is important to place rel=”nofollow” in the links. google’s ok with it because those links don’t juice up PRs.

JohnChow.com is a great blog. It should come back to google.

The funny thing is, that this exact posting ranks #1 for the keyword John Chow. I call that ironic.

Could be another chance with google?

Why should Google dictate the way business is done online?

Google came to the www as a search engine service in 1998 and in nine short years they seek to control how money is made online,

Take it from me if you were to follow the “Daisy Parade” with their so called “clean web mastering” guidelines, your website would be stuck at being invisible to Google for years and certainly nobody wants to grow old before seeing a dollar for their effort on the internet.

Google is KING because they supposed controls between 70% to 80% of the search marketing industry.

Another point of note is that over 90% of user who use Google to search the web also use Yahoo and you don’t see Yahoo trepsing around the internet setting rules on how you are to make mooney and to make your website brandable on the World Wide Web.

Point of Reference: Google encourages whatever strategies webmasters|bloggers employ to get prominence on the web, someone will always be there to be improvising on a loophole somewhere because of the so called “secret algorithms” that are used to give prominence to those who successfully make to the front pages of the SERP’s.

Google has a legitimate right to dictate how online bussiness is done. Google drives in atleast 90% of traffic to any site, so we are just gonna have to put up with them

Its a good site

LOL!
You guys rocks! You’re #3 for “John Chow” request.

This guy is really popular: somebody even registered johncow.com domain to promote it as Chow’s site.

What John Chow does in term of SEO is more interesting than the content he produces.
If you agree with that premise it is right that sites that discuss John Chow should rank higher than John Chow’s own content.

What is interesting is that Google does not follow this logic with more mainstream celebrities and that searches for Paris Hilton or David Beckham for example return the “official sites” first and not “Hello Magazine” or “OK!”.