Google Finally Catches Up With John Chow Linkback Promotion
Well, it looks like John Chow has added Google to the list of companies he’s pushed too far with his experiments. John was running a linkback promotion where in return for sites linking to his site and including the anchor text ‘Make Money Online’ he would link to those sites. In total about 400 sites linked to John with the correct text, which helped push John’s site onto the first page of results for ‘Make Money Online’.
Well, Google have just struck back and John’s site is no longer on the first page for the term. It also seems that Google have applied an additional penalty to John’s site, as his site doesn’t even appear on the first page of results for his own name anymore. I’m betting that across the board John’s google links have been downgraded.
John doesn’t seem too worried about this as Google isn’t one of his big traffic sources. But, if it was this site, getting penalised by Google would be a disaster. About 70% of my traffic comes from Google, which is why I always try to stay on Google’s good side. The same goes for Google Adsense, which in the past accounted for all of my revenue, although this month it has dipped below 50% for the first time.
Clearly there’s nothing wrong with working on generating links, but if you plan to hit the levels that John Chow did then you really should make sure you can cope with the damage if it all backfires on you.
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Comment by Pete on 27 January 2008:
@Everton : That is a good observation; I’ve only been a reader of his site since Nov/Dec 2007, so I didn’t quite catch that yet. Nevertheless, I only wish my website has that kind of loyal readership!
Hey by the way, you guys are doing a great job with Connected Internet. You’ve sure earned me as a loyal reader of yours
Comment by Everton on 27 January 2008:
@Pete
I actually disagree. John’s traffic seems to be very constant from month to month, which suggests to me that a lot of his traffic is direct from his loyal readers, rather than from search engines.
Comment by Pete on 26 January 2008:
Google can penalize John Chow all they want, he seems to be doing well with traffic anyway. He’s shared a lot of good web marketing advice on his blog, and I’m definitely a fan.