John Chow the reknowned internet entrepreneur has finally decided to play nice with google. John Chow for those of you who don’t know is one of the first bloggers to succesfully make money online through his blog. He has taken his blog from earning nothing to earning hundreds of thousands a year. How did he do it? He used every medium available to him, email marketing, twitter, banner ads, text link ads and paid posts.
Now theres a lot of bitching on the internet about John Chow, some say he’d sell his grandmother for a few bucks. I don’t buy into this, in my opinion you can’t knock what he has achieved and those that do I reckon are not jealous of his income from affiliate marketing but more of his notoriety on the internet. He is basically one of the poster boys for Affiliate Marketing.
Having said that, this is probably the reason that Google decided to make an example of him in 2007 for his paid posts and text link ads. Google don’t like paid posts or text link ads, it messes with their system and they consider it spam. In 2007 Google decided to penalise JohnChow.com and pulled it’s rankings. Basically JohnChow.com couldn’t rank for anything including his own name. Google did fix it a few months later but the ranking for his internal pages never fully recovered.
So what has he done now? He has created a duplicate site to JohnChow.com at JohnChow.ca, removed all the items considered spam by Google and he has 301 redirected googlebot from JohnChow.com to this site.
Why has he done this now? Well Google seem to be cracking down on Affiliate Marketing and paid posts, there is the recent situation with Matt Cutts unfollowing Shoemoney on Twitter due to paid tweets and perhaps John is trying to smooth things over with Google to get ahead of this. The other reason I suspect is for testing purposes. After it was anounced on Shoemoney.com that John Chow had done this, there was a lot of speculation that John would be hit with a duplicate content penalty. Well a couple of weeks earlier I read an interesting post on SEOMoz that google anounced that there wouldn’t be a duplicate content penalty for using identical content when geotargeting which is exactly what John is doing. This is I suspect Johns main reasoning and he’s trying to raise his readership numbers by using geotargeting but you decide!
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