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 3gp on 30 June 2007:
jhon chow has learned the lesson hard way i think he need to hire some SEO to sort out things. Recent update in google algo or you can update in terms of quality links and penelization towards paid links many people in the industry are hit hard.
If you income is 50% below can you tell me the do you have the same CTR? eCPM is low?
Comment by Ravi Singh on 30 June 2007:
Ya Sorry … My mistake
Really Sorry .
Comment by Everton on 30 June 2007:
@Ravi
I don’t mind at all, but it’s ‘Everton’
Comment by Yael on 30 June 2007:
No doubt he went too far in the linking schemes
Comment by Zath on 30 June 2007:
Well it must be nice not to be too concerned about your Google traffic, but I’m sure he’ll still be raking in the cash regardless, he’s obviously pretty good at what he does.
Comment by Ravi Singh on 30 June 2007:
Hi Averton i hope that you don’t mind that i have taken your article
Pingback by Google Finally Catches Up With John Chow Linkback Promotion | The Review Blog on 30 June 2007:
[...] Taken From the Article by Averton from The [...]
Comment by Mike on 30 June 2007:
Good. I’m glad they’ve caught up with him. I unsubscribed from his nauseating site when he started charging people for removing the nofollow tag from their comments.
Comment by Nirmal on 30 June 2007:
I just did a Google search for John Chow, his site is not there in the first page. This looks like Google has really penalized him.
We cant go against Google as its one of the major traffic site.
Lets see what John Chow does now.
Comment by horisly on 30 June 2007:
i had noticed that from DP forum.
and,30% of my site traffic come from google.
so i will stay on the google side.