Dave and Jay - Crazy Web Entrepreneurs

We recently redeveloped the website for my day job, and we’ve been doing a big push in the web design avenue. Thus far, I’ve been spending a lot of time organically building links for a plethora of local web design terms… (”city name web design” or “city name province web design”).

Initially, I had a lot of success getting ranked for my primary terms, and one of the methods I decided to use was a top commentator spot on JohnChow.com with one of my key phrases. Shortly after I started that, my rankings dipped a little bit and I hit a brick wall. I just could not get my sites to move up any farther for relatively non-competitive terms, no matter what I did.

Finally, in exasperation, I stopped bothering with the effort of maintaining the top commentator spot, and I did not expect any changes… I was just frustrated with a lack of movement in my rankings. A couple of days after I dropped the commentator spot, I was shocked to see my site rise up on the listings once again!

Now, I’m not claiming any definitive proof… one man’s experience does not a trend make. However, it is possible that there is some sort of negative value passed via a link from John Chow, or at least a site-wide link. I’d be very interested to hear the experiences of anyone else who has gone after a top commentator spot, preferably for smaller to medium sites (as a large and popular site would most likely shrug off any negative effect, as I’m sure the effect is not a large one, if it even exists).

Even so, the benefit of advertising (if you actually have a product targeted to the audience) on that blog is well worth it (regardless of any negative effects that may or may not exist)… just for the amount of traffic there, it’s obvious you can make some serious coin (and people have) by advertising there.

Yesterday on Webmaster Radio, John talked about how webmasters should not be dependent on Google in any way, and while that’s great on paper… not all of us can reach the point where our website is a well-known Internet brand. He went on to say that no one’s sure why he’s been penalized (not banned, people like to throw that out there and I think I’m guilty of using that description as well, but he is not banned… just heavily penalized) and that they think it’s due to selling links.

My hunch is that Google didn’t like his “review my blog for a link back” campaign, which was touted as the best piece of link bait ever. It’s essentially a link exchange scheme on a grand scale. It was brilliant, but basically a violation of “don’t participate in link schemes designed to increase your site’s ranking or PageRank”. Even so, I don’t blame John for bucking Google - he’s outgrown them. The rest of us haven’t, though…

Good Profits!