John Chow vs. Google what went wrong

Don’t do what John Chow did

It looks like Google folks haven’t been too happy with John Chow’s link building strategy. Search Google with “Jhon Chow” and u will get the proof of that

It is amusing to note that Jhon’s own rank dose not rank 3-4 for surch result of his own name. It makes sense Google is directing people to an article about why he is being punished that’s to say because of his unethical link back strategies. If you look at Google's Webmaster Guidelines, you will note the following:

Some SEOs and webmasters engage in the practice of buying and selling links, disregarding the quality of the links, the sources, and the long-term impact it will have on their sites. Buying links in order to improve a site's ranking is in violation of Google's webmaster guidelines and can negatively impact a site's ranking in search results.

John Chow started a link exchange campaign back in 2006, in which he would give a link back for every review of his blog when the text anchor 'make money online' was used. John now has over 870 links from various sites as a direct result of this campaign. This has proved to be very successful for John, because since inception of the link campaign his blog income has grown from $2790.05 in December of 2006 to $12,569.61 in June of 2007, an increase in revenue of $9,779.56.

However the remarkable link back campaign which gave John chow a super star blogger status have come at a high price. suddenly John Chow’s blog “dissapeared” from Google search results. With further investigation, you’ll find out that his blog is still cached but it seems like it’s been manually punished by Google. He’s 41st search result for the term “John Chow” and 47th for the “make money online” (his primary keyword). Moreover, John got banned at Digg and his blog was attacked by a SEO hacker at the same time.


While John was trying to figure out what happened, others have been fast to profit from his misfortune. Especially the www.johncow.com which has taken the first search result for the “John Chow” and managed to get very popular in a short time period.

When asked what he thought of Google dropping him so far, and why he thought Technorati did not show him in the top 100. He had this to say,

"Google dropping me down in the search result is disappointing. However, that's the way it goes sometimes. You can cry about it or you can continue to build. I have always advised readers to never put all their eggs in Google's basket and this is a good example why. If all my blog traffic came from Google, my blog would be dead right now.

I have no doubt that Google will eventually rank me back higher. Search engine follows people and when people visit a site without the help of a search engine, it gets their attention. Google's job is to give the most relevant search results. Right now, they're not doing that with the search term John Chow and that makes them look bad.

Technorati seems to hand select blogs for inclusion in the Top 100. How they select who gets in and who is not, nobody by Technorati knows. It doesn't effect me financially by not being in the official Top 100 list. As long as they ranked me correctly, I'm fine with that."

Million dolor question

Do you think it is ethical of John to pursue the link back campaign, or do you think Google is in the wrong for dropping John so far in the search results? Who do you side with and why?