Net Frontier Marketing

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So I wrote a review of John Chow’s blog a couple of days ago stating amongst other things that he had gotten the #1 rank on Google for Make Money Online, a very desirable term.

A mere 2 days later, Google is doing one of its dances and he has been thrust far away from the party and onto the 5th page of results.

In this post, he speculates that Google is cracking down on the link back review format (review my blog and I’ll link to it).

I’m pretty sure it has nothing to do with what John experienced in his rankings. The real problem is that the linking scheme looked unnatural and that’s what Google caught.

Let’s look at the facts:

There are approximately 80 batches of 10 reviews up on Johnchow.com. That means 800 blogs have linked to his home page, all of which used the anchor text “make money online”.

Considering John’s blog is so popular, he has tens of thousands of incoming links with all sorts of different anchor text, which normally would give him sufficient authority in the eyes of our search master to perform this Google Bomb in near total impunity.

If he had less “natural” links or his blog was less of an authority, he would have been penalized for all the perfect anchor text links long ago. So maybe, just maybe, he reached the threshold were Google says enough is enough with the bombing already.

But it’s probably more than that. The big trouble is that all the blogs that link to his home page with the desired term also link to his “review my blog” page.

That irrevocably screws the pooch and places John’s link strategy just below Pamela Anderson’s chest on the scale of “natural”.

Furthermore, John obligingly links back to the blogs that reviewed him in groups of ten. This only serves to make everything all the more obvious to the point where Googlebot would catch it even when high on crack.

Here’s how it could have gone differently:

• Vary the anchor text ever so slightly, keeping your core terms but adding modifiers.
• Find another way to announce your “review this blog” offer. This was surely a real killer.
• Slow things down a bit. 800 in the space of 2 months is a bit of an overkill.
• Find a way to publish the link backs to the blogs that reviewed you other than repeating the same rule of 10 over and over. Maybe by adding 3 links in a box at the end of each post, or perhaps rotating them in the sidebar, adding them to past posts… Anything but the way it was done.

As John says, it’s no great loss to him. The loss of the term barely makes s a 1% dent in his daily traffic.

I’m just surprised it went on for so long. This only proves that authority sites have extreme leeway when it comes to “creative” link hoarding but they are not entirely immune.

Google doesn’t want you manipulating the search results. That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t do it, you should just be sneakier about it, that’s all.