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Google Drops John Chow in Search Engine Results Page

john chow bloggerJohn 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]

google, SERP, SEO, John Chow

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