Google Crackdown Part II, JohnChow.com Freefall Begins

Author: Jim Kukral Category: Blogging, Google, Online Marketing

Thursday
May 31, 2007

I’m not sure what John Chow and his crew aren’t understanding? It’s pretty darn obvious to me, and something I’ve been warning about for a long time now.

Read my lips. Google doesn’t like when you try to manipulate them. Especially when you flaunt it in public.

John has been doing wrong in Google’s eyes, and the backlash is just starting to come about from the Google Gods. I don’t guess this… I know this. I’m not making this up. I’ve talked to people at high levels at Google. Listen to me… or don’t.

DO NOT TRY TO MANIPULATE GOOGLE. DO NOT SELL LINKS FOR PR. DO NOT DO ANYTHING EXCEPT WRITE HIGH-QUALITY, HELPFUL ORIGINAL CONTENT.

Anything else you do against that mission statement is a mistake, and your site/blog will falter long-term once they catch on to you, and they will catch on, sooner than you think. A massive clean-up is underway, and the crackdowns are beginning to come fast and furious.

From John’s post today…

I can only assume the changes are designed to discount all the waves of review for linkback, technorati trains, alexa trains, etc.

Don’t assume. It’s 100% true. Read above.

With the algorithm change, Iâ€™ve decided to put a stop to my review for linkback promotion. All reviews received to date will be posted, but I will no longer accept new reviews. I may bring the promotion back at a later date with some changes. However, Iâ€™m going to take a wait and see for now.

Why stop now? Why not keep selling (insert sarcasm here) highly relevant links on your blog like you do about “Free male enhancement” and “Creditcheck”.

Don’t you get it? Google does not like that you are selling links to not relevant sites, and you are/am being punished for it. This has always been my problem with John Chow. I have nothing, nada, zip against him. I’m sure he’s a great person. I simply question his tactics and more specifically, his preaching of the absolutely wrong long-term “tips and tricks” to aspiring Internet marketers and bloggers.

His approach is wrong. Period. Long-term, and now shorter-term, you will fail using his approach.

Listen to me. Stop trying to “game” Google. Stop trying to make money off of passing page rank and non-related content. Just stop.

Start writing good content. Start solving problems. Start thinking about how to help a Google user.

Or do what John does. I’ve said my peace.

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Comments

Ian Lee

June 1st, 2007 at 2:21 am

Hey Jim,

“Start solving problems.”

This is great advice. I can’t agree more.

Jonathan (Trust)

June 1st, 2007 at 4:40 am

My post didn’t show up over there, maybe later but again:

http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/text-links-and-pagerank/

Lost track of how many times I’ve referenced that. Simple as reading. They don’t like buying and selling of links for PR/SE benefit. And then when you talk about it, advertise it, flaunt it, you’re asking to get nailed. Also getting all your links in with the exact same link text is not smart (google bombing) you should vary it.

But from reading the comments over there, you can tell it’s a bunch of newbies just getting into the business so they don’t know any better. Live and learn. That site is just begging to get nailed, so it’s not surprising if it does and continues to slide.

June 1st, 2007 at 10:58 pm

i bet john chow makes alot more money than you

Garry Conn

June 2nd, 2007 at 11:09 am

Jim,

Excellent article. And excellent clairification of the situation. Getting the news about it on John’s site was downplayed to seem like it was not much of a bigger deal then having a flat tire, knowing that you have a jack and spare. :)

This is a HUGE loss and could very well be the end of John Chow dot Com.

OR!!!

It could be a testimonial that documents a blog that CAN be successful without the need for Google.

Zac Johnson

June 2nd, 2007 at 11:11 am

Looks like he is listed at the top again for “make money online”.

John Ettorre

June 2nd, 2007 at 2:14 pm

Right on, Jim. Very well said, and timely too. As for the ignoramus who says the guy you write about makes more $ than you, if this person were a tad brighter, they might have figured out that implicit in your point is that doing things the wrong way will only be successful in the short term, till Google catches up with your gaming of the system. Most of have the need to eat over the long term.

cin77

June 2nd, 2007 at 3:23 pm

I’m new to the blogging community so still learning a great deal from people. I’ve been pretty reluctant of joining the Technorati trains and such, since I don’t really know what value does it bring to the readers. What are you guys’ thought on that?

Blogging with Desi Baba

June 3rd, 2007 at 5:53 am

I disagree, Google invited him for certain projects. John is very popular in the blogsphere and his popularity will only increase. And he said he only gets 150 hits from “make money online” . So he gets 150 out of the 11,000 hits per day from that keyword, that tell you it doesn’t affect him much. plus he’s back to #1 again for that keyword.

Matt Keegqn

June 4th, 2007 at 7:57 am

Well said! With Google cracking down on AdSense Ready sites, more is expected from the search engine giant to clean up much of the mess we all encounter online.

I don’t know John Chow personally, but advocating an unacceptable linking strategy is wrong as well as dangerous to the viability of a website or blog.

Johnny Fuery

June 5th, 2007 at 2:11 am

Amen. I stopped reading JC regularly when he presented an “evil” affiliate marketing strategy a couple of months back (he was stuffing affliate codes down user’s throats without them knowing by loading single pixel iframes).

Still, he’s got an awful lot of readers, traction, and influence. I gotta give him credit for that, even if his methods are often questionable.

I personally haven’t gotten any $3K checks from google. John has.

gautam

June 5th, 2007 at 3:14 pm

It seems that JC was taking it to the extreme. His site still has got some text links for “male enhancement”.

And these are words that will definately trigger google to penalize the site ….

But he’s making money of those links.. :)

John

June 28th, 2007 at 5:11 am

——
DO NOT SELL LINKS FOR PR
—–

Thats my page, not google’s and google is not god.

Jeremiah

June 28th, 2007 at 11:24 am

Given the fluid nature of a blog (expiring front-page posts), I am somewhat skeptical that Chow has been hit for his Review for Linkback promotion.

Even if he has, he is the kind of dynamic blogger and huckster — I mean entrepreneur — who will always bounce back. I’m not sure this is ultimately going to be destructive for John Chow. But it might help other bloggers looking to make a quick dollar be more reluctant to overly leverage paid-for-links blogging.

get your free iphones

June 28th, 2007 at 6:06 pm

I wonder if the traffic on his site dropped that much? considering most of us just write JohnChow.com in the address bar, and that by dropping in the google serps the scandal might bring him some traffic .. still sad for him though.

DarrinW

June 30th, 2007 at 12:56 pm

Thanks for sharing this info Jim. But since John Chow is so popular, just because Google drops him wont make a huge dent to his blog, I believe.

I think his blog is sitting on many thousands of bookmarks in computers the world over. He’ll bounce back.

Mong

July 3rd, 2007 at 3:04 pm

This can be seen in one way or another. In this industry there are people with different viewpoints. I think its a completely wrong on Google side to control and rule this industry by controlling breath of webmasters.

If Google doesn’t like paid text links then they should make Adwords a free service and rank sites according to merit. This way they will do more good to this world..

O’ Google Don’t be EVIL

SEO Optimization

July 7th, 2007 at 5:11 am

There is a slight line between what you say (or at least how you present that) and whats going on. The first is, John is NOT trying to trick the Google’s algorithm (from what i see) what he is doing is, selling advertisement spaces. Now, people like the site and like to buy links from there, it could be because his high PR or because his HIGH traffic. Anyway, he could put a rel=”nofollow” tag on the links, but he just might not want to do that. Making profit from your blog..there is nothing wrong on that. 80% of bloggers run blogs just to make money, so once you have achieved that why not to make the money? He’s ranking it is true that are falling for his name and for make money online term, but have you notice his feed readers since two days? Jumped from 5k to 6k and his latest posts reach 4k+ reads from the site (we don’t count the feed reads). This means, his stats did not fall down together with his rankings, actually they went up. The whole idea of his blog was and is to make money from the blog, sort of experiment how much he can earn from his blog, now, he earned 12k USD last month, so i think his experiment was successful..

We can blast and blum and blam and spit on him even if we feel like, but remains the fact that John deserves respect, not because he is a great guy (actually i dislike totally some of his comments) but because he achieved a goal that anyone interested at making money from nothing but writing dreams about. $12k last month…previous months were around 10-11 and 9k an average of 10k per month, thats 310.000 year income.

Billy

September 3rd, 2007 at 11:50 am

This is a small casualty. Looks like the link brokers, and sellers will start evaluating their business models for a piece of the Google pie.

Contamination

November 3rd, 2007 at 8:42 am

I loved it how john got smacked!

Lalit

March 11th, 2008 at 3:02 am

I happened to read your post almost a yr after you wrote this..and by the look of it..john has been increasing income ever since May 07. His site is not only a successful one but has some amazing content using which small time bloggers like me make some money everyday.

When do u exactly feel he will stop earning??

Will this comment be published??

TheAnand

June 7th, 2008 at 12:01 am

mmm….it seems only like yesterday…hehe….i just typed in johnchow into google and got into this…strong lang. and good way of writing :)

TheAnands last blog post..Posts You Might Have Missed On TheAnand

Travian cheats

June 16th, 2008 at 10:00 am

John Chow deserves it. He shows of too much with money. I am sure he is liar. After getting delisted from google, he still earns big bucks. His Kontera earning is always $1000. Not 1 penny more or less. He is a big time LIAR.

Jason

June 29th, 2008 at 5:55 am

I was looking at alexa today and just noticed that his blog is already starting to lose traffic. This isn’t about messing with Google. No, this is about messing with everyone with lies.

moralde

May 27th, 2009 at 9:49 am

hmmn. Interesting exchange of ideas about JC here. I heard JC is indeed pushing it to the extreme intentionally as an experiment to how far he could go. He probably expected his penalty to happen and also probably was prepared for it. Anyway, for a man this cunning and clever, he could fall, but definitely could rise quickly and just brush the dust off his shirt and go on ahead.