Live by the Google die by the…….. oops
As somebody living on the edge and using aggressive marketing John Chow wisely tried to diversify his money making strategy so that his site wasn’t relying on Google.
Unfortunately most sites rely on Google a hell of a lot more than people think. In Johns August income report over $2000 was from selling links via Text Link Ads. What happens at the next PR update when JohnChow.com goes to PR0 (as is the case on 10 datacenters today)? Will TLA keep John in the network?
Will people still work hard to get a link in the top commenters section if the blog is no longer a PR6?
Any site that sells links is risking not only the wrath of Google in terms of rankings but also in terms of PR. Like it or not Google controls the link selling industry and there is nothing we can do about it.
Patrick Altoft is Director of Search at Branded3, a Leeds SEO & Digital Agency specialising in SEO, Web Design, Development & Social Media.
Comments
Read the 17 comments below, or add your own!
many are prediction doom for Chow in the coming weeks and months
I see o pagerank only on 6 data centers. I thin it’s just temporary value. Maybe, due to update?
While I did indeed made over $2,000 from selling links, I made $2,500 from signing up publishers to the TLA affiliate program, which is not affected by PR.
As for the ten PR0,those datacenters are down. I ran Problogger.net and a few other sites and they were PR0 for those datacenters as well.
I never really thought of it that way…
But his Alexa rank is still hanging in there.
I wouldn’t pay much attention to those PR graphs. I plugged some sites that I know aren’t going PR0 and they all had a handful of datacenters reporting PR0. Either that tools is broken or not all datacenters are returning PR.
Hm, looks like a temporary fail or something, because other domains (microsoft.com!) yield PR0 as well in some datacenters.
I totally agree with you Patrick. Google controls everything and it is logical why they’ve banned John.
Umm… they are all PR 6?
Maybe you should track the stuff for a few days in the future? PageRank is one of those things that fluctuates too much.
Hmm odd, I just loaded that page again and now about 1/3 of them are PR 0?
Browser cache gone bad perhaps?
Matt Cutts has said that a PR update isn’t going to happen this week so I’m not saying John has already gone to PR0. Nobody knows what will happen in future.
The point I was trying to get across is that Google has 100% control of the link selling industry thanks to PageRank.
Yup…
No matter how much you try to convince people that PR at times is irrelevant and can be manipulated, they do not want to know. It is a common belief that PR is the key to successful ranking.
Great details. I am currently working from home but not the kind of work that you do. I am slowly starting to build some form of online business so I can have multiple streams of income. I will be persistent as it really takes that to be successful online.
Hello just thought i would let you know i had a problem with this blog appearing frozen as well. Must be gremlins in the page.
I agree with that 100%! Action makes things happen. Nobody ever learned to walk without taking the first step.
Whenever I hear, ‘It can’t be done,’ I know I’m close to success.
Congratu-malations!
A subject near my heart cheers, i’ve been occupied with this subject for a while.