For those of you who don’t know, JohnChow.Com has been running a “review johnchow.com” post. All you do is review johnchow.com with a link to his rules page and his main page with the anchor text of “make money online“. He’ll then give you a link from his PR6 blog back to your site. This helps his blog and your site as well.
One astute reader happened to notice that johnchow.com has fallen from the #2 spot in Google SERPS for the keyword “make money quick” online. In fact, when I went and checked, I could not find his site in the first 20. Another reader also noticed that the amount of supplemental pages in the Google SERPS from johnchow.com has risen.
What Happened?
Apparently johnchow.com has been penalized by Google. They may have felt that all the new anchor text of “make money online” pointing to johnchow.com was a Google bomb and penalized his site. This appears to be the most likely situation.
What is a Google bomb? Do you remember back about a year ago when a group was pushing for everyone to link to a page on Wiki about President Bush with the anchor text of something like “stupid”. Hundreds if not thousands of websites were linking to this page with the anchor text of “stupid”. Then, if someone went to Google and looked for the keyword “stupid”, the first page to pop up was the Wiki page about President Bush. When many pages point to one particular page all with the same anchor text in a relatively short amount of time, this is what’s known as a Google bomb.
It didn’t take Google long to catch on to what was happening as many spammers would do the same thing with links to one particular landing page. Google started catching these people who were Google bombing and penalizing their pages in the SERPS.
From the looks of it, there were too many people reviewing johnchow.com’s site and using his suggested anchor text of “make money online” and so it looks like Big Brother Google spanked his site for it. Maybe Matt Cutts can fill us in on what, if anything, has happened.
Will it hurt his site? Probably not as he still has hundreds, if not thousands of links pointing to his site. Plus this little “scandal” may actually make his site much more popular than it is now, if that can be done!
Let this be a lesson for everyone. Google has caught on to Google bombing and if it can happen to John Chow, it certainly can happen to you and I!
4 responses so far ↓
1 NJ // May 31, 2007 at 8:17 am
The irony, of course, is that google wouldn’t be where it was now if they hadn’t “encouraged” millions of website owners to link to them through their little search widgets, or paid them to place links on their sites to encourage people to take up adsense.
One rule for them, another for the rest of us.
2 admin // May 31, 2007 at 9:11 am
I have to agree. They seem to have forgotten where they came from.
3 Calvin Harvey dot Com // Jun 2, 2007 at 3:40 pm
Man that sucks. I hope that he can redeem himself.
4 admin // Jun 4, 2007 at 7:29 pm
He already has. He’s now #1 when you search for “make money online” in Google. Apparently Google had a hiccup. But let’s wait and see how long he stays there!
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