John Chow Got Punched in the Face by Google

Ouch.

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?