Google Drops John Chow in Search Engine Results Page
John Chow, a popular money making blogger, has his blog rank dropped in Google search engine results page (SERP). His blog no longer gets the top ranking for “making money online”, not even in the first few pages of SERP for searching his name or blog’s domain name. John Chow has been penalized by Google.
Ouch! That’s hurt! I can feel the pain because I had similar experiences. Google search is the main source of my site traffic, therefore I got hit very hard that time. Luckily, Google lifted the penalization after 2 or 3 months.
In John Chow case, dropping in Google SERP does not seems to affect his site traffic very much now. I guess he has built up a good loyal readership. However, since many online advertising programs rely on Google data as a factor of ad pricing, I am afraid it will have negative effects to John Chow’s blog income.
Why Google drops John Chow?
Fellow webmasters believe the main reason is John Chow’s review karma / link baiting / link building campaign. He asks other bloggers to review and link to his blog with certain keywords (“make money online”) then he will give a link back. It is quite evil to trick Google for higher ranking in SERP.
In Google’s webmaster guidelines, it is clearly stated that:
Avoid tricks intended to improve search engine rankings. A good rule of thumb is whether you’d feel comfortable explaining what you’ve done to a website that competes with you. Another useful test is to ask, “Does this help my users? Would I do this if search engines didn’t exist?”
and,
Don’t participate in link schemes designed to increase your site’s ranking or PageRank. In particular, avoid links to web spammers or “bad neighborhoods” on the web, as your own ranking may be affected adversely by those links.
My two cents
So, what have you learned? Quoted from Get Found, “If you are going to game Google, keep it unnoticed.” Or, better still, NEVER try to trick Google to improve your site ranking.
You only need to do some basic white hat SEO and focus on your content quality. You will see the result in a long run. Patience is important. Think and write for your readers, not search engines.
Good luck!
[via Get Found]
Yeah LiewCF. I remembered I blogged about your event too when you were dropped by google for “liewcf”: http://getfound.com.my/hey-google-that-hurts/
That was my blog’s 2nd post :D which is why I remember.
Anyway, I believe it is a great lesson to learn not to depend on search engine and build up defensive traffic.
I guess this would make him even more popular now, since everybody is blogging about it.
I wish this could be a lesson to those bloggers who wanna do the same
Heh, expected liao.
But yay, I am still on first page for make money. Hehehe.
@lilian: that’s great. do you make more money from the keyword search?
I’m sure this will give lesson to many bloggers and that includes me too. From now on I’ll not get into any of these tricky games :)
From my searching just now, John Chow still at the top position at Yahoo,MSN and ASK and i believe also in others search engine. We can learn something here, dont just focused on one but many.Its make your safe or still have backup.
haha…liew, u play the trick before rite… as you mention on the “link schemes” do MyList consider a link schemes?
@iCalvyn: i did linking to low quality sites last time.. what is “MyList” ?
too bad for john, i can’t even find his link for searching more specifically = Make Money Online with John Chow. only appear for searching johnchow.com .
i think it is too late for google to block john chow since he is already famous and a lot of people is talking about him already
…so that’s the price you pay. *remembers — But yeah, as stated above, at least John is popular enough. I wonder if anything has happened to those who did what he asked.
Take a look at his RSS.. close to 7000 therefore, PR is not important anymore… he is making tons of cash right now!!!
I agreed with Gecko, in other way around John Cow get a lots of publicity among bloggers so his traffic also spread around through this. Plus he had a loyal reader dont worry.
Ouch…. thats really hurt for any webmaster or blogger! we should learn this lesson.
What’s your opinion about Link Exchanges? Do you think it hurts the rank or not? Good Luck Guys.
@James: Link exchange is good if increasing PageRank is not your purpose.
he is now getting a lot of links now
em….now that i understnd..ehhee.tq
I had the same problem with my real estate site that is provides my main monthly income. The strange thing was that I wasn’t doing anything wrong but for some reason my site dropped drastically. Fortunately after about 3 months it came back and I was able to make a living again!
Makes sense to me. Aggressive methods to improve your pagerank are bad for the internet as a whole. However, it seems like Google has a little too much power in this regards, given its foothold as the most popular search engine.
Ouch. Thats gotta hurt… I wouldnt recommend taking shortcuts to increase traffic. Its better to concentrate on good content and building up a loyal client base.
Im surprised that John was willing to take this risk owing that google is the leading search engine generating the majority of traffic for most blogs.