John Chow and the Great Google Debacle

I have been reading John Chow's blog for several weeks now as a matter of interest in the posts. I love his blog and read it every day. After a while, I realize that John is a pretty big noise in the world of blogging. Admittedly, when I first started reading the blog, I had no idea who he was. After a couple of weeks of reading deeper into his blog and looking elsewhere online, I realized that he is kind of a rogue in the blog community and some of his actions may have gotten him in trouble with someone you don't want to be in trouble with; Google.

John is making thousands and thousands of dollars per month by monetizing his blog with the support of "advertisers" and other revenue generating avenues like Google Ads and selling links. Matt Cutts, Google's Search Engineer, had warned people about subscribing to paid link advertising in his 2005 blog post. Apparently this is where pro blogger got into a bit of trouble when he began to push the threshold of what Google saw as acceptable conduct.

For a period of time, John Chow's blog was ranked #1 for the search terms "make money online." Right now if you Google John Chow, his actual site shows up at #54 in the results where it used to be at #1. Even though he has broken into the top 50 on Technorati, he is still being punished by the biggest boy on the block. John explains how his fallout with Google all went down in this June 2007 post. The best quote is from the last line of the post, "Let’s see, I’ve been banned from Digg, banned from Technorati and now bitch slapped by Google. I’m doing pretty good!"

Understand that this #54 ranking is an improvement over where he ranked a couple of months ago but he still has quite a ways to go before he will gain back what he lost this year. Granted, if you search John Chow, you can get to his site from the vast amount of posts on other blogs, but it is always nice to be #1.

Now this is pretty old news to most of you and I am coming on the tail end of it all. I just thought that is was a pretty interesting story about the power of Google and how they can shut you off if they are so inclined. As I was putting this post together, I started wondering what happens when a search engine gains too much power. Is there a potential for information to be controlled? Can a corrupt individual eliminate someone from the rankings with enough money? I don't know, I just thought that I would throw that out there.


So what's the moral of the story? Build your site on organic search results with quality links from relevant sites. Don't get banned by Google by buying links, simply buy AdWords. Don't sell links, display AdSense on your site. Don't try and take short cuts, write quality content, provide substance to your site's visitors, and understand that it takes time to build a successful site that's valuable to your visitors.