Jul 07
4
John Chow has a Google Penalty
John Chow published his earning stats recently for his blog
June is the start of summer. Advertising revenue generally slow down during this time. Add in the fact that Google put me in their dog house half way though the month (June 16 to be exact) and you would expect income to go down again. However, I’m happy to report that summer and Google hasn’t done much to stop my rise.
Total Blog Income For June 2007: $12,569.61
It’s interesting to read that Mr Chow’s recent Google penalty hasn’t appeared to have affected his blog earnings. In fact he claims that they are up on previous months. One can only wonder how well he’d have done otherwise, John hasn’t yet published any figures on how much traffic he got from Google.
I’m sure John could monetise further by maybe allowing access to his server logs or publishing his stats somewhere. That would make for very interesting reading indeed.
I remember 1st encoutering John Chow’s blog from a link on Jim kukrals blog. I naturally went over and gave John my 2c’s worth and intially found myself thinking hmmn this guy is heading for a huge google kick in the nuts. Sure enough it happened too and as of today a search for John Chow doesn’t show John Chows blog. Even if you broaden the search term out a little and type John Chows blog you still don’t get to see his site.
Spotting a Google penalty from 6 squillion paces
Look a little further at Johnchow.com by doing a site:johnchow.com search at Google and you’ll see that he has in excess of 2800 results.
Do a search for a unique title tag from his site, say “Laptopgamers.com Launched | John Chow dot Com” which theoretically should be the most relevant for that query and you’ll see that amongst the 8 results returned, the johnchow.com page is the last.
Seems like its hardlines for Mr Chow, or maybe not (going on his blog earning stats)
It is noteworthy to say that if you type JohnChow.com you do get to see his blog and at number one position, ableit with no snippet and zero cache.
John tells us that his site dropped out on June 16th, it’ll be interesting to see how long John’s site stays in search engine purgatory. I don’t know if he has submitted a re-inclusion request or even began to clear up some of the high profile Google no no’s he was engaging in.
The important lesson here for anyone who runs a blog or a service that relies on Google or any search engine traffic for that matter is this. If you are doing anything remotedley iffy then do not brag about it and expect to remain unscathed. They will and do make examples of people who do this stuff, and it can cost you a lot of money and kill off revenue streams.
John Chow ( if you take what he says at face value) it seems, is relatively unscathed by all of this, yet one has to wonder.
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