What Can Internet Marketers Learn from John Chow?

For those of you that don't spend much time reading through the internet marketing blogosphere, John Chow is a well-known blogger from Vancouver with a blog entitled Make Money Online with John Chow dot Com. However, I have never been a big fan of his blog. Not only are many of his posts completely unrelated to making money online (much of the money he generates from his blog are from paid reviews which aren't really related to the topic his blog), but the majority of his posts that are actually about making money online are ways to exploit or game existing opportunities.

So, while the title of this post may have lead you to believe that we would be examining some of the tips that he has provided, we are actually going to look at a major mistake he has made and how you can avoid it.

Several weeks ago, if you searched for terms related to John Chow or the phrase Make Money Online, his blog would have been in the top results that you saw. However, according to Shoemoney's SERPs script, his blog is currently ranked #59 in Google for his own name and #53 for the phrase Make Money Online.

So, how exactly did this happen? Well, according to Pronet Advertising (the guys behind Crazy Egg, who ironically rank #1 in Google for John Chow), it all goes back to his blatant abuse of Google*.

Once again, for those of you that don't follow his blog, John launched a campaign back in December to gain links. For every person that wrote a review of his blog and linked to his site with anchor text related to make money, he gave a link back to them. This resulted in him receiving a massive amount of targeted links, which not only gave him a PageRank of 6, but also greatly increased his ranking for those terms.



Due to the increase in traffic and the increased PageRank, John's earnings from things like ReviewMe and Text-Link-Ads have grown drastically. However, because he is now being punished by Google for his blatant and public abuse of their system, he could be facing a major drop in revenue. Although he has said that he is not concerned with the drop in traffic, he is not taking into account that this could affect his earnings from advertisers if his Alexa ranking suffers and/or if Google devalues the links and drops his PageRank.

So, what can you learn from John Chow? In the simplest of terms, DON'T BITE THE HAND THAT FEEDS YOU. As you know (and John Chow has acknowledged), you can't put all of your eggs in Google's basket. However, you also have to realize that abusing Google can have more consequences than you anticipate. So, while getting targeted links from related blogs and web sites is central to any good SEO campaign, it is important that you do not disclose every move you make to the world and do not attempt to push the system to a point where it's going to come back to hurt you.

*John has also had problems with Digg and Technorati in the past for trying to game their systems.