Here's my theory from an older thread: http://forums.digitalpoint.com/showpost.php?p=3593808&postcount=26 http://forums.digitalpoint.com/showpost.php?p=3679308&postcount=66 While the info: I suggest in the second link above does not work anymore (the url itself now brings up a cPanel - Apache page) there may still be some hangover...
before this thread I didn't even know who or what john chow is........and why would he shut down? If he copied someone's work, why not just remove the copyrighted info and then move on?
You can, just like it's Google's index and they can order it anyway they please. The don't have an obligation to rank anyones site in a certain position. If you paid Google money for your listing, i could understand but you don't. Not having a go at you, but when a company does something to benefit you at no cost you can't really complain when they move the goal posts and it hurts you. Simply change tactics as the rules change to beat the system.. Welcome to the world of SEO.
Google jobs is to rank sites , they earn from it so it is not free although we don't pay for it.If everyone in the world would ban google bot then there will be no google ( I don't advice it and I know it is impossible) , this is not free this is cooperation. The point here is the search engines were passive , they did not told us the rules directly but on this occasion google comes out from passive mode , to active mode and began to give orders.In other words they are begining to Dictate the rules to us.
OK who the hell is this dude? Can he walk on water? evidently not since he cant even maintain a website And why is he so important? thx malcolm
I doubt it was because of the nofollow rules. My best guess is that by linking back to the guys who were writing reviews of his blog, he gave credibility to them. Google must have some kind of algorithm to detect this. Receiving thousands of links to your site won't hurt you, even if they are reviews. But it you link back to them on your blog, Google you detect this quid-pro-quo scheme and penalize the site.
Isn't it obvious? You can just visit johnchow website and read all of his articles.. Its an old story my fren... Cheers! Sha
%99 of us did not heard him before (so this is a very succesfull viral marketing for him) but the important point is google first gave a warning and came out with punishment.They were guiding the river but now they want the river to go on their canal.
John Chow basically broadcast to the world of what he was doing on his blog. I guess he didn't think that Google employees read his blog.(or someone rat on him) He should have just advertised his site without telling everybody what he was doing.
John Chow is my biological father. I was led to think John Cow was for several years, but finally John Chow published on his blog that the Cow was lying!
My problem with this is that John Chow tended to have top-quality content, and I'm sure at least some Google employees know this. By penalizing Chow's site, they are rewarding lesser sites that will now move in front of him in the rankings. That seems very unGoogle-like. When I do a search on Google, I want the best quality, most-relevant results. I don't really care what sites are giving out links to other sites. There has got to be a better way to penalize Chow, perhaps by ignoring all linkbacks from his site (I'm sure someone at Google knows how to do this).
That goes for an awful lot of sites Google is penalizing (including some of mine). A couple of link sales (even relevant ones) which doesn't benefit your own site in the serp at all, makes Google serp penalize your site, leaving Google users to visit all the garbage and spam sites that jumps up taking the positions instead. Such a huge amount of garbage and spam ranking well in Google now but they can't seem to penalize those.
That's a news.... 99% of you don't know about JohnChow EXAGGERATED !! Have you read the whole thread?
I agree that John Chow had good content, but increasingly good content is irrelevant to the largest search engines today. Maybe someone will come up with some thing better.