John Chow's Recluctance to Reveal How He Took Back No. 1

John Chow's brag of how he retook the number one spot back has a lot of people congratulating him for the achievement. He offers no detailed information except for a cryptic hint that Google webmaster tools is your friend and that you should get to know it very well. Hovering over the link he provided, suggested that it may be a problem in that Sitemap area.

It soon became clear that John's Sitemap was part of the problem. It was in conflict with his robots.txt file. Skitzzo of SEO Refugee discovered the differences between a cached version (saved here also) of the file and the now drastically altered version.

Examination of the old robot file disallowed Googlebot for his archived monthlies, feeds, trackbacks, files ending with extensions of .php and .xhtml and any pages with a question mark (?).

What prompted the change in the first place? Jez found another article of John's on how to get your pages out of Google's supplemental index. At the time of the post, he had 1,790 supplemental results. After a robot file tweak, he has managed to remove 10 of those pages from the index. Good job John!

More importanty, his robots.txt tweak had another nasty side effect. Not only were pages being removed from the supplemental index, he was losing regular indexed pages as well. John had 3,190 pages in the index total. His robots.txt file effectively wiped out 340 (non-supplemental)  pages and is now down to 2,840. Excellent job John!

But, John does not mention the robots.txt change in his post. Nor is there an update to the supplemental index post. Instead, he is trying to milk his secret for everything it is worth. And in John's case, he is looking for more money.

I was going to use this post to explain exactly what I did to restore my number one ranking. However, after reading Kumiko’s comments in my Taipei 101 to number 1 post, I’ve decided against it. I think everyone will agree that this kind of information is extremely valuable - some “SEO Guru” tried to take me for $4,000 by saying he knew the answer (which I highly doubt since he made no guarantee).

Whether this change in the robot file was the reason for John's return to number one or if it was just the Google update process taking few days to settle down is not an issue. People will probably be debating this for weeks to come.

What is an issue is that John seems to think that he is onto something, I genuinely believe that. But I also know that John knows of how dangerous his supplemental index post is and is afraid to admit it. Meanwhile that supplemental post is wrecking Google results for everyone who hangs on John's every word -- John is not only evil, he is an egotistical bastard who obviously does not care about his readership. Grade-A job John!

How to Rank in the Top 10 for John Chow

To my surprise, I noticed a John Chow article I posted sitting on page one of the results for a "John Chow" search at Google. This got me to thinking about how that one post out of 2,140,000 results made it up this high.



This will be more of an analysis than a proof. I have a PR0 blog and really not much going for it in terms of a large readership base. Heck, I do not even use a John Chow label/tag to promote his name with internal linking.



Examining the external links for the article sheds some light:

• A reference from a "John, I told you so" article I posted. His last name, Chow, does not appear anywhere in the post. I do reference two of John's posts though, this is a case of "you are what you link to". In this case, it is John Chow.
  
  
• Dawud's explanation of why John Chow's billing for DoFollow disappoints him. In this well articulated article, Dawud gave me the a strong anchor text link of simply John Chow. He references several other Chow related articles, but my link is the only one with his name in it. Very sweet Dawud!
• The nofollow proponent Blog Rumble post entitled Do Not Follow Me Please. was a loss of respect opinion. The link from here refrenced my blog name only, and was misspelled to boot ---Websubtractions. Gotta love that one! Still there were several "you are what you link" references.
• Proaffiliate's post was simple. They linked to me in both the Title and Body of the post, of which the only thing in the Body was just the link. Kewl! The title of the post was WebStractions: John Chow offers "paid" DoFollow links. That pretty much says it all.
• Last, but not least, Andy Beard's DoFollow | No Nofollow - Highs & Lows espoused John's Dofollow approach as one of the lowliest of the lows and likened him as a modern-day Internet version of Ghengis Kahn. Andy's link text did not include Chow's name, but there was plenty of Chow references before and after it. This is Chow by association, I guess, and is still giving many click-through action from his readers. Thanks again Andy.

You may have noticed a couple of references to "you are what you link" in there. I firmly believe that in absence of strong keywords in your link text, you will still get a benefit from what you are linking to. A mere link to any John Chow page will return you a relationship with, at the least, his name. Since most of the linking posts to my article did not have Chow's name in the link text. The articles themselves, however, were about Chow and that relation was passed onto me and Dawud's strong keytext and a power link from Andy added some punch.



None of this, however, explains the hows and whys of the high placement in the search results. It is safe to say that there should have been more authoritative blogs than mine to garner this position. Here is a list of various opponent reviews of John Chow from the Top 100.

• Scott Jangro's John Chow’s Dangerous Advice concerning Affiliate click fraud
• Arpit Jacob's John Chow Gets Kicked Out of Google which has a stance pretty much like mine in regards to artificially induced links (paid or otherwise)
• The IMDB on the actor John Chow which has nothing bad to say, but it doesn't have anything good. This has nothing to do with this John either. Just threw it in there to spread my John Chow relationship out.
• Josh Dorkin's beef on how John Chow Crashed my Browser again which oddly happens when he has 5-10 tabs open in Firefox. My suggestion is to install NoScript and AdBlock -- but reading his blog via a Reader is probably the safest .
• Somebody at Turk Hit Box saying that John Chow still needs to learn how to improve his Blog SEO. My question is WHY? With over 5500 readers reported by Feedburner, who needs Search Engines.
• Jim Kukral's John Chow is Killing his Blog by trying to hard to make money. And none of that seems to be sinking in with some of those 5500+ readers of his.

The rest of the Top 100 are all supportive raves and/or paid reviews. Lot of support for John,with very little negative feedback.



It was kind of odd that my article was the only one concerning the Pay-To-DoFollow links controversy. Would have thought there would be at least a couple of others in there.



While I do not think that ranking for John Chow in the results is one of my goals in life, it is comforting to know that at least one dissenting view of one of his particularly dangerous money making tips is showing up.







Technorati Tags: john chow, seo, serps, dofollow, nofollow, ranking, john, chow

Ain't Gonna Say It, But I told you so John!

Poor John is scratching his head over his latest revelation that his keyterm for "Make Money Online" went from the number one slot to being buried on page three. Tsk, tsk. I will buy you a beer for that one though!



I did warn people of Google's intent of cracking down on paid links and highlighted the fact of fucking with their NoFollow brainchild by offering them up as Pay To Dofollow (PTD) links may be a disaster in the making.



Google's latest in a series of algo updates, has cracked down even tighter on paid links from publishers. It appears that they are punishing them even further with ranking reductions. The easy to spot targets for rank reduction would be sections such as sidebars and footers. Ferreting out dofollow links buried inside a sea of nofollow's is without any stretch of the imagination very doable -- or at least raise a red flag.



Being so close to the main content of the page (the blog post), PTD's may require a little more tweaking on Google's part. Whether or not this was one of the factors in John's reduction is hard to say. However, there are obvious and numerous link candidates on his pages to warrant the flaccid nature of his evidently limper ranking impotency.



I would also like to mention to all of the people who where suckered into PayPal-ing for a PTD from John -- this is not a one way street. Google may be waiting for the light to change before proceding through the intersection to slap you with a penalty as well. Hopefully you will have noticed that the light has changed and not get T-boned by Google in the process.









Technorati Tags: google, nofollow, dofollow, paid, links, penalty, pagerank, serps

John Chow offers "paid" DoFollow links

John Chow has developed a DoFollow plugin to selectively remove the rel="nofollow" extension from comment links, in which he is offering for your comments at $10 a month. He also has a plan to sell the plugin and/or set up an affiliate program to peddle the gimmick.



Yes, I said gimmick and you will also notice that I emphasized the term "paid" in this post title too.



There are quite a few reasons why you should not buy into this scheme. Anyone who does will just be throwing their money away. This is no more beneficial to the subscriber than tits on a boar.



Let's say you "rent" your comment link for a few months. And remember, it is rent. If you don't pay it, you get evicted and NoFollow is taking up residence on your sofa.



Links will not pick up any juice right out of the gate either. Once they "stick" for any duration, then they may give you some benefit. But looking at a page with close to 200 hardcoded links without any comments, how much value will that be? And once it does stick, it will be buried in the archives and off of page one.



Comment links are not the same as site-wide links. Site-wide links will overpower your comment link without even lifting a finger. Chow's site has approximately 3,140 pages indexed by Google. By his admission, a site-wide link costs $240 a month -- do the math, that is only 7.6 cents per link. How many comments will you have to make to bring your margin down.



If you look at this gimmick in the right light, John Chow is not really selling you the NoFollow removal. You are paying him to comment. John is fully aware that you will be commenting (or not) on a daily basis just to get your link in there. This is reverse pay-to-comment mentality.



Lets talk about that plugin a little bit. This would be a first wouldn't it -- a WP plugin you would have to actually buy? This goes against the grain of WP itself doesn't it?



The selling of the plugin is far more evil than duping some of John's more ignorant readers into the link renting. And I wouldn't doubt if some pissed off blogger hacks the plugin and offers it up on one of the more popular download sites.



But John better revise that plugin to include the microformat rel="paid". After all, they are paid links and Google's Matt Cutts is looking very closely at them. That goes for the site-wide links too.



There is a mechanism in place via the Google webmaster console to report paid links. Albeit, it is not an official one and is being run through their spam reporting system. Currently the main purpose of reporting is so that Google can augment their existing algorithms.



And what does Matt think about paid links?

 

... link sellers can lose trust, such as their ability to flow PageRank/anchortext. Also, we’re open to semi-automatic approaches to ignorepaid links, which could include the best of algorithmic and manual approaches.



I even mentioned earlier this year that paid articles/reviews/posts should be done in a way that doesn’t affect search engines.



As someone working on quality and relevance at Google, my bottom-line concern is clean and relevant search results on Google. As such, I care about paid links that flow PageRank and attempt to game Google’s rankings.

I think I will just end this with by agreeing with Matt. 'nuf said.