John Chow rocketed from obscurity to become one of the most well known bloggers virtually overnight. Recently, he’s been campaigning Google hardcore to get himself ranked for the lucrative term “Make Money Online”. However, it seems that recently Google is not 100% happy with the methods he’s been using to achieve this ranking, and have penalized him a bit.
He’s currently slipped from a #1 ranking for the term, all the way down to page 2. It’s too early to tell if this is just a temporary dip in his ranking or the beginning of a downward spiral… only time will answer that question.
If, and that’s a big IF, John has irked the sleeping giants over at Google, it’s likely because of his self-proclaimed “most successful link bait campaign ever”. John has offered to link out to every single blog that writes at least 200 words reviewing his blog and linking to him with the term “Make Money Online”. We’ve even taken advantage of the offer here at this blog.
Figuring out the elusive search algorithms used by Google is often as reliable as your local soothsayer reading chicken bones or tea leaves, but I would not be surprised if Google deemed the ‘review my blog for a link’ campaign (which has brought in over 700 links by the way) as undesirable practices. Stay tuned after a bit more time passes and Google’s machinations are revealed!
Good Profits.
May 30th, 2007 at 11:14 am
I don’t know if Google actively sought his site out and penalized him, if that was the case I would imagine he wouldn’t be on page 2, my money is on an algo change that just happened to give him a little slide.
That being said Google does have a vested interest in not appearing to be easily manipulated and with John’s ever increasing media presence it definitely doesn’t look good when 700+ reciprocal links can rank your site for such a competitive term.