JohnChow Bows To Google
In recent post from JohnChow blog, he have declared that all bloggers should follow google webmaster rules. Well, it is not a big news as google will slap those who goes against it’s rules with some penalty. The point is, it’s mentioned by a guy who is making $40k+/month going against all those google webmaster rules for 3 years straight. Finally, he gave up fighting the giant and starts obeying google webmaster rules. I would say, you had a long losing battle John there. I wonder how many bloggers gets penalty following your footsteps and how many is lucky enough to lift their penalty from big G.
The good part is his blog looks a lot better now. He is setting up and example for other bloggers to follow google rules in order to stay in the market. We may not be very lucky as John to have Neil Patel as an introducer for Matt Cutts. But, following google webmaster rules, can avoid all those hassles of getting penalty. So now, who is against google webmaster rules now? Maybe, you should re-consider your stand now. I strongly suggest use rel=”nofollow” tag for all paid links on blog.
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July 20th, 2009 at 5:04 am
I am not surprised that John Chow bowed to Google. I am just surprised that it took so long.
You give good advice to stay within the Google Guidelines. It is after all their house so I don’t think that it is unreasonable to expect us to follow their rules.
Like you, I wonder how much damage occurred to smaller website operators that followed Chow’s advice.
~Mack
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Work At Home Reply:
July 21st, 2009 at 9:41 am
At least he gave up now than taking 5 or 10 years. I’m sure my son will follow his steps to of going against google. I just wish google will lift penalty on those who ask for re-inclusion without going trough Matt.
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July 20th, 2009 at 2:45 pm
Hail the all-knowing and powerful mighty Google……LOL
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Work At Home Reply:
July 21st, 2009 at 9:54 am
Let us all hail… hehehehe
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July 20th, 2009 at 4:19 pm
I admire his ability to avoid googles rules for so long, and It is a shame we have such a BIG BROTHER looking over us, like one wasn’t enough.
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Work At Home Reply:
July 21st, 2009 at 10:01 am
It’s actually we are in his big G house. They have conquered the industry.
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July 21st, 2009 at 7:38 am
I’m personally not a big fan of google. I wrote my own post about the John Chow v Google issue so it might be worth a read to get a totally different perspective.
One other thing, I know it’s off topic but the best post has comments closed so here goes. I’ve just changed my blog to ‘dofollow’ and I’d appreciate it if you’d add it to your dofollow search. The address is http://blog.incomesinternational.com. I may move it to the default domain soon but I’ll let you know if that happens. I’ve also set some criteria before dofollow is enabled to tackle any comment spammers.
Bye for now.
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Work At Home Reply:
July 21st, 2009 at 10:09 am
Really? I hope you change your mind on Google webmaster rules soon as the opposite allies are dropping their weapons and join big G army.
I will add your blog in the search engine. Thanks for supporting dofollow movement. Can I know what criteria before dofollow enabled? Just curious.
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Andrew Reply:
July 21st, 2009 at 1:26 pm
The criteria is to prevent comment spam. I have only disclosed 3 of 5 of them because if I disclose them all then comment spammer will be able to game the system and the plugin won’t pick it up. So the other 3 are,
dofollow on author link after 5 comments
dofollow on comment link after 10 comments
must be a 5 day delay.
As I said there are 2 more which I won’t be disclosing but if your a genuine commenter and not a spammer you won’t be affected.
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Work At Home Reply:
July 22nd, 2009 at 6:47 am
It’s good to see you have some rules to give dofollow link. But, in my dofollow search engine, all blogs gives dofollow link on first comment. It may lead to spam links, but I would like to share only sites that gives dofollow link to comments with minimal limitations.
July 21st, 2009 at 3:20 pm
You guys have the dofollow and nofollow thing a bit wrong. When you dofollow an outbound link to a bad neighbourhood you run the risk of getting a penalty from Google. Also, spammers use dofollow to boost their pages pagerank with total disregard for what they are commenting on. To avoid comment spam simply moderate comments and leave a very clear warning that blatant comment spam will not be allowed. Further, if you check the website of the person who comments, and it’s a decent site (i.e. not a bad neighbourhood, then you should allow the comment. Outbound links to relevant or authority sites help your blog as opposed to a nofollow link which does nothing but waste a potential link on the page.
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Andrew Reply:
July 21st, 2009 at 4:31 pm
Don’t want to sound argumentative but you’ve actually got that all wrong. If you need a full explanation of how dofollow/nofollow works I suggest you watch the video Matt Cutts released a couple of months back on the subject.
In summary, nofollow was created as a means to prevent comment spam and it failed miserably. All that a dofollow does these days is basically say ‘I vouch for this site’ thereby passing 1 point of PR to that site. The link is still indexed regardless of the rel tag and will still show up as a backlink. Dofollow is there to provide link love and that’s it. I’ve written a post on my blog about it with some examples using my own domain but I don’t want to spam this blog so you’ll just have to go and look. You should find it on the front page.
In relation to comment spam, if you think about what I have done, I expect few problems from spammers. Most spammers won’t come back several times, over a 5 day period in order to meet the criteria to get a dofollow from me. Besides that all first posters have to be approved and I look at their site at that point. After that the system does everything else on autopilot.
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Work At Home Reply:
July 22nd, 2009 at 6:45 am
I just want to clear 2 points here
1. Nofollow links does not pass page rank value
2. Nofollow links does not help google serp ranking.
I strongly suggest all to read http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/pagerank-sculpting/ written on June 15 09.
Please refer:
***Nofollow links definitely don’t pass PageRank. Over the years, I’ve seen a few corner cases where a nofollow link did pass anchortext, normally due to bugs in indexing that we then fixed. The essential thing you need to know is that nofollow links don’t help sites rank higher in Google’s search results.***
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Andrew Reply:
July 22nd, 2009 at 6:52 am
I’m pretty sure that’s what I said, just a bit differently so yes I agree, mostly.
I’ve read that report and watched the video as well. I still find a contradiction in what he says. He says (and it’s common knowledge) that PR is valued by many things and one of those things is the number of sites linking in. It doesn’t matter if it’s followed or not because we are simply talking about inbound links which Google will spider regardless of the rel tag and if its nofollow it simply won’t pass any PR to that link from the original site. But it is still spidered, and it is still counted as an inbound link.
This could only mean that getting enough inbound links, even nofollow link, will actually add weight to your PR.
Just a theory and I am experimenting with it at the moment but it will take some time before I will get any conclusive results.
July 21st, 2009 at 9:04 pm
Google has around 19,000 full time employees… it seems pretty obvious to me that they have a little bit more time to dedicate to rooting out sites that don’t follow best practice than most people have time to find chinks in the system
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Andrew Reply:
July 22nd, 2009 at 3:24 am
I think I’d have to disagree with that. Those 19000 employees consist of everything from network engineers to software engineers, business client managers, support etc. So in reality they might have maybe 1000 – 5000 people dedicated to the task.
Now if they need to put that many people to work looking to find the sites that are breaking the rules then how many people would you imagine there are trying find the kinks.
If you put together all of the people trying to get around Googles dictatorship, and if they only spent an hour a day doing it, you’d still end up with a full time work force of 10 times what Google is throwing at it.
It’s all relative.If google has 5 people looking for the black hats then that means there are at least 500 black hats that they want to find otherwise it would not be commercially viable.
Mostly I believe that people have lost sight of the fact that Google is nothing more than a product and a business. Google is not the internet and have no claim over it. Even though they do appear at times to be in total control doesn’t mean you have to play their game.
John Chow proved that over a 3 year period.
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Work At Home Reply:
July 22nd, 2009 at 6:50 am
Google does not completely removed John Chow blog earlier. It was still listed but on deeper pages. Even the penalty goes from PR5 to PR3 unlike other blogs from any PR to PR0. Only on recent John’s penalty it goes to PR0. I think they still give chance for bloggers to follow some google webmaster rules.
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July 23rd, 2009 at 10:43 pm
I’m glad to see that John has jumped back on board the Google train. Seriously, both he AND Google were suffering from the standoff. John’s got a creative edge and that should be worth something.
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Work At Home Reply:
July 24th, 2009 at 10:47 am
I’m glad he have joined too. But, I don’t see Google suffering because of John. Google may suffer because of bing, not John.
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August 2nd, 2009 at 2:59 am
i hope Bing do give google a run for it’s money and I hope that microsoft introduce a rival against Adsense. Competition is good for consumers!
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Work At Home Reply:
August 4th, 2009 at 4:51 am
Bing gave good source of traffic at the introduction phase. But, lately it is dropping. I don’t know what is happening to Bing.
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September 25th, 2009 at 12:45 pm
since i never use paid link/sell paid link, so i don’t know if Google will penalize those who use dofollow link to get paid.Well, my question, did john chow earnings decrease after he followed the G rules? =)
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Atniz Reply:
September 26th, 2009 at 9:49 am
I have no idea too. Need to check his this month’s earning to figure that out. Plus, he even claims that only a fraction of his income comes from text links ads. So, I don’t think he will see a lot of difference there.
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