I know a lot of blogger likes the JohnChow.com strategy. John Chow practically propelled himself to blog stardom in less than a year and thru his marketing campaigns, went into the Technorati Top 100 list (although he wasn’t actually hand-picked). So, why did I say that the “John Chow Strategy” isn’t good for anyone else?
He used to run linkback contests such as the “Make Money Online” Googlebomb. Well, his link back promotion got him a Google penalty. Yep, that “review me and I’ll post a link back to your blog” has actually backfired. Now, if you search for the name “John Chow” on Google, his blog will not even show on the frontpage. See John’s explanation on this here.
So, a fair warning to fellow bloggers who join or are actually doing the same strategy. This example might have answered Andrew’s earlier post on link trains and such.
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Did the same thing happened to problogger.com? If you look at it on alexa it just plummetted and very nearly vanished towards the end of march.
alexa link: http://www.alexa.com/data/details/traffic_details?url=problogger.com
He he sorry, that was problogger.net
well, that’s the reason why john chow is called evil because he’s doing evil things…..
I think the strategy is fine because by the time Google or anyone else notices, the damage has already been done. And talking about it just makes the buzz even bigger, so you can still get to his site through other sites that talk about the controversy. So if you do something like this, you have to do it just as hard or harder to create a similar effect.
I predicted this a couple of months ago (Organised Google Bombing), and have been turning down all requests for similar link swaps ever since. It was obvious that John was going to be found out, and banned eventually.
I feel sorry for him, but I can’t help but feel he working dangerously close to the edge.