That’s the first word out of most people’s mouth when they get hit.

By a punch in the face.

And by Google.

John Chow just got totally nailed by Google over his anchor text linkback contest.

What happened here?

If you don’t know the history behind this, John Chow has been running a linking contest for a while (he was on number 87 last time I checked) where if a another blog wanted a link, they would have to link to Chow’s blog (to his homepage and to his review rules page) with a certain piece of anchor text. At first it was make money online, and then later he changed it to any of these:

• make money
• make money at home
• making money
• make money from home
• make money online
• make money on the internet

So at first it worked. The dude was really hitting it with Google! He was #1 in Google with the search term make money online. Life was good.

Now he doesn’t even rank for his name in Google.

What is anchor text?

Anchor text is the visible part of any hyperlink. It’s what you click on. For example, check out this link:

Best Blog on the Planet
Best Blog on the Planet is the anchor text. The actual link is RodLogan.com

So what happened to John Chow?

He got penalized. By Google. Figuratively speaking, Google has punched John Chow in the face.

Why did Google do this to him and his blog?

Here’s John’s thoughts:

“When I made the decision to monetize John Chow dot Com nine months ago, I know that I would use the blog to push the limits of what was possible. The blog was to be used as a case study so others can learn from its success and failures. It seems that once again, I am in a Google penalty box. Not only am I no longer on page one for the search term, make money online, but I am no longer page one for my own name. The number one theory for the penalty is I overdid the linkback promotion. Whatever the reason, it doesn’t really matter. The make money online search term was sending me about 150 visitors per day.”

The advantage of JohnChow.com is that it has tons of readers that either visit the site by directly typing his URL into the address bar of their browser or they use an RSS feed service like Google Reader, Bloglines, FeedDemon, or others. I mean, the guy currently has 8300+ RSS subscribers on FeedBurner! I mean… DAMN!

John Chow follows with this:

“I am 100% positive that Google will eventually restore my number one ranking for my name. Right now, they look pretty stupid. Do a search for John Chow and you’ll get page after page of sites talking about JohnChow.com, but JohnChow.com isn’t the number one result. Let’s see, I’ve been banned from Digg, banned from Technorati and now bitch slapped by Google. I’m doing pretty good >:)”

I do agree it is weird that Google doesn’t even have him for his own name. Seems like Google is getting more caught up in showing him a lesson and putting that as a priority over showing what would be the most relevant search result for someone searching for “John Chow”. I mean damn, even JohnCow.com is there! (John Cow is a spoof site of John Chow dot com with an Alexa rank of 20,340. No, I’m not kidding.)

It was a tempting technique to raise your PageRank.

I’ll admit I got excited by his success with this tactic and I was considering using it with some of my blogs. But now I’m freaked! Of course, this could be directly related to the fact that he’s such a huge blogger in the blog-o-sphere (god what a dorky term). Search engines could just be using him as a warning as I’d imagine it’d be very hard for them to police every site out there.

Could they make an algorithm to automatically detect and penalize this?

Possibly. Seems difficult, but if Google is dedicated they could figure something out. Imagine you’re Google. You notice a site is getting tons of links into it so you figure, “Hey, this guy must be pumping out some great content to be getting so many links!”. But then you realize he’s also linking back to the same people. And everyone is linking to him with the exact same text. I mean, damn, ain’t that hard to see it.

Update!

I found another blog that has had the same thing happen! Unfortunately for some of you readers, the blog is in Spanish – so if you only know English, well sorry you’re screwed. Just kidding – I’ve translated it for you! This is from AlexSEO:

“En uno de mis blogs (no diré cual), Google bajo el posicionamiento que yo tenía con mis palabras claves del primer puesto al puesto número 20. ¿Cómo es eso? Cuando antes buscabas x palabra clave en Google, aparecía mi blog de primero, ahora si buscas esa palabra clave, mi blog no aparece sino como en la tercera página de resultados.

A mi parecer, Google se dio cuenta de esta estrategia y está penalizando a varios blogs, al parecer a John Chow le está pasando lo mismo.

Así que os recomiendo estar mosca y no hacer uso excesivo del anchor text, ya que podrías perder tu posicionamiento en Google. “

My translation of Alex’s post:

“In one of my blogs (I won’t say which), Google dropped my search engine position for one of my focused search terms from #1 to #20. How did this happen? When you used to look for that term in Google, my blog would be #1, now it’s on the third page.

In my opinion, Google noticed this strategy and penalized various blogs. Looks like the same thing is happening to John Chow.

So my recommendation is to not use excessive anchor text linking strategies as that might cause you to lose your position in Google. “

This looks to be a bigger phenomenon than I thought! Has anyone else been penalized? Is it temporary or permanent?

Below I’ll be placing these social networks in the order of traffic I received from them after a period of about 2 weeks. I figure two weeks should be enough time for the news to get voted on and looked at. Obviously, if some of these give more of a long-term benefit then it’s harder to judge.

What long-term benefit could these social bookmarking sites bring?

It’s possible that some of these social bookmarking service sites have nofollow and some have dofollow. This is HUGE when it comes to the assistance these sites may give you when it comes to Google ranking. Perhaps a site doesn’t bring much traffic but due to a high pagerank boosts your popularity in google. I’ll call this “indirect traffic”. “Direct traffic” is when the social bookmarking/tagging site directly brings you traffic due to the links on the page. Of course, if the site does both well, well then that’s a winner!

Grand total of traffic from each site

stumbleupon – 67
digg – 24
delicious – 18
reddit – 16
webride – 5*
slashdot – 2
netscape – 2
blogmemes – 1
bluedot – 1
furl – 1
newsvine – 1
indianpad – 1

Analysis of social bookmarking traffic data

There’s a reason why I placed an asterisk (*) next to the webride total. I never submitted my sites to them. Say what?

I registered but I never activated my account. I finally activated (I thought the site was just busted – I didn’t realize I needed to activate) and I submitted both sites today. Let’s see if that brings us some success!

What does this mean?

Obviously Stumbleupon is a huge winner here.. look at the traffic it’s brought compared to the other sites! Although digg brought slightly more traffic than delicious, I prefer delicious traffic to digg traffic. Here’s a great explanation by Brian Clark:

1. Bookmarks are Enduring. While it’s true that sometimes someone will bookmark a page simply to come back when they have more time, more often than not the Delicious user views your page as a resource that they might return to again and again. A Digg is simply a one-time vote that may or may not result in big one-time traffic. A Digg is short-term event, while a bookmark endures.

2. Bookmarks Show Commitment. Related to the idea above, a Delicious user has made a commitment to your resource by adding it to their collection of links, most likely because it provides a benefit to them. Other Delicious users notice that commitment, and therefore your resource gains in credibility thanks to that bit of social proof, which often leads to more bookmarks. I believe this is one of the key reasons why a big day on Delicious translates into subscribers and return readers, while the same exposure on Digg often doesn’t.

3. Each Bookmark is a Targeted Link. Here’s the real power of social bookmarks. Each bookmark you receive is a separate link on a separate web page. Moreover, those links are classified by tags which define their overall relevance, much like normal link anchor text does. Not only does this help you in the search engines, it makes Delicious itself a search engine. Tagging will no doubt play a big role in the evolution of web search, and Digg’s model misses the boat here.

I’ve constantly heard stories of how digg traffic brought minimal income via ad clicks but completely dropped their servers to the ground due to the intense traffic of a front-page digg story. Truth: Digg users don’t click ads:

The link aggregation sites have, arguably, the most tech-savvy demographics on the web. These users DO NOT click ads. Less than 10% (from our metrics) stay on the site longer than 90 seconds (even if the article would take a normal person 3 minutes to read). Digg, in particular, has brought the lowest rate of RSS subscriptions per visitor group of any link we’ve ever had – under 1/10th of 1 percent. These statistics hold true for every site owner I’ve ever spoken to that has made it to the top of Digg or the other services. These users simply don’t participate/contribute/stick around/click.

Now apply those statistics to advertising – the results are dismal. The page views are extremely low, meaning those banner ads you serve on an impression basis are barely pulling their weight. Factor in the high number of Diggers who use ad blockers in their browsers and you’re barely covering bandwidth costs. Clickthroughs on AdSense or other contextual programs are equally miserable – I’ve heard others indicate that a day atop Digg brought fewer ad clicks than 100 visitors from Google – no surprise there. If earning revenue is your goal, you need to create fantastic content that gets legitimately featured – the real earnings come when you get traffic via the engines and the other sites that link to you, not from the initial surge of uniques.

How to get the maximum traffic possible from del.icio.us

We’ll go over this in detail in other blog posts but there’s some important points to be said about delicious.

1.Tag well. Make sure to use basic tags that others may use to find your social bookmark. For a food site, use tags such as food, cooking, culinary. Don’t use obscure social bookmarking tags like chinese-waffling-chefs.

2.Bookmark and tag all of your top posts. Do you have those great posts on your blog that you really feel would help or entertain others? Don’t be shy about bookmarking and tagging them! Remember, you’re doing others a disservice by not letting them know about your great writing!

Conclusion

So we’ll go back to this in some time and see how these sites are doing in my social bookmarking campaign. I’ll also be submitting them to socializer sites and see how those do too!