John Chow is Punished For His ‘Evil’ Ways
John Chow being punished on Google is old news, but I wanted to get my opinion out there on the subject.
Currently, searching for the keywords of John Chow will not even bring up John Chow’s domain in the top ten. How could this have happened? Pronet Advertising showed a revenue stream for John Chow since Mr. Chow started an aggressive link-building campaign at the end of last year. The article then mentions that this link-building strategy may have gotten John Chow’s site punished by Google, Technorati, and several others.
Over at Connor Wilson’s site, I read an article describing one of the ways John Chow was trying to build links. Connor explains that John Chow would give a link if you wrote a review about his site. The promise of a “PR-6″ link is the major incentive. In the end, Connor concludes that he was “tricked” and that one must not be evil and to not put all your faith into one thing.
Being evil is one thing (which John Chow claims to be), but being openly evil and rubbing it in the faces of the companies that can make or break you (i.e., Google) is another. There are a ton of legitimate ways to score links, but John Chow chose the easy way and consequently got punished for it.
One of the ways I have tried to build links at RA Project is to give stuff away. For example, the WordPress plugin Ajax Edit Comments has helped us achieve a Technorati ranking of about 14,000. For a blog that is three months old, I think that is an awesome ranking. And all of the people who have linked to the plugin have done so legitimately because they like the product. Also, searching for the phrase “edit comments” in Google returns our website as the fourth result. Once again, this was all done legitimately using “ethical” link-building.
Here at the Reader Appreciation Project, we also rank number one for the keywords “reader appreciation”. Is this an accident? Not really. Most, if not all, of our articles talk about some form of reader appreciation.
John Chow out of all people should know how to score legitimate links and achieve a legitimate ranking. It seems, however, that he wants to take the shortcut to the quickest payoff. As a consequence, some of his readers feel “tricked” and he has gotten burned by Google.
Patrick Lee says...
Oh, the humanity! What will happen to all of John Chow’s hapless disciples? Maybe they’ll try to hitch a ride on a passing comet. Actually they probably would if somebody promised them a PR7 backlink…
Sephyroth says...
I wonder how all those folks who paid him $10 a month for nofollow to be removed feel now….
Sephyroth
http://www.sephyroth.net
Bes says...
I also wrote a review for John Chow, and I have been thinking, as I already told you, to remove that review and tell John to not to link to my site anymore. Sure, his site has PR6 and other search engines will still consider an incoming link to my site from his to be important, but I don’t want it. We have built RA Project from the ground up using nothing but quality and belief in what we write, and I have been trying to do the same on my site since the beginning. When I wrote the John Chow review, John’s site was interest and not spammy. Now it is all about advertisements, and things like buying your comments for $10 is just plain weird. Sure, it is a brilliant business model, but in my view, no no.
Those people may want to ask for a refund now, for the months unused, since having nofollow removed won’t do anything now. Nofollow itself was only strictly observed by Google, so if those people paid to have Google like their comment links, they are not getting anything from their payments as long as Google blacklists John Chow. However, if those comment-link-buyers wanted every search engine to like their comments, they didn’t need to pay at all; nofollow is only strictly effective with Google, and a bit with Yahoo and MSN search, and thus paying $$ for those other search engines wasn’t worth it in my view. Such a practise also reduces the very idea of commenting to “let me buy a link back to my site, and simply add a few words to make the comment appear legit.”
Nice post.
Ronald Huereca says...
Bes,
That would be awesome if you removed the post and asked John to remove your link. I’m curious of the correspondence that would take palce.
Ronald Huereca says...
Sephyroth,
Everyone should demand a refund! I smell a class action!
Arpit Jacob says...
well he had it coming with his aggressive link farming. Its funny how he thinks that google looks silly because now when people search for JohnChow his blog is no were in the top 10 or even 30. Google did the right thing.
Jeffro2pt0 says...
If it makes you feel any better, I never knew about this site until I heard of the ajax edit comment plugin via the WordPress Podcast. No Google searching needed.
This plugin is going to be ranked very high on my list for the top plugins a WordPress webmaster needs to install. Thank you for releasing a much needed plugin to provide this seemingly MISSING functionality.