John Chow (Still) Banned by Google?

Hey Google what is the deal here? Are you trying to make yourself look irrelevant now no matter the cost? Or are you trying just to make another “example” out of a very popular website? Go ahead an check Google for “John Chow”

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=john+chow&btnG=Google+Search

I saved a screen hot of the SERP for prosperity

Missing John Chow!

The John Chow website has been removed for some sort of reason around June 28th. For those of you who didn’t notice. Google seems to have implemented a filter or demoted the John Chow website. John Chow explains here:

It’s All About Pushing The Limit

“Pushing the limits of blog monetization almost means pushing Google to the edge. There are many who will say that playing with Google is like playing with fire - sooner or later, you’re going to get burn. It seems that once again, I am in a Google penalty box. Not only am I no longer on page one for the search term, make money online, but I am no longer page one for my own name.”

So John decides to monetize his blog his own way and Google demotes him??? Seriously?? I really commend the attitude that John has taken here. He doesn’t seem over pissed (even though he should be) and basically says he doesn’t care. He didn’t get that much traffic from them (Google) anyways. He then goes on to state the obvious:

“You should work on getting Google traffic for your blog, but you shouldn’t do it the exclusion of everything else. If all your traffic is coming from Google, then you need to work on getting other traffic sources. You are in a very scary situation. It’s like having all your blog income generated by AdSense. If that’s all I did, this blog would make only $1,000 a month instead of $10,000. Don’t put all your traffic eggs in one basket.”

David Naylor also have a decent blog entry on this topic:

John Chow Banned for John Chow on Google

Hamlet Batista explains more on his blog:

John pushed Google’s limit and got dropped! Should you push it too?

Google please let us know what is the deal because it is of my personal opinion that it makes you guys look foolish not offering the most relevant website for a keyword like “John Chow”. I fully expect the ranking to return and hope that Matt Cutts would explain what and why this happened.

Now their is another possibility. Google rankings are simply going nuts. Mike McDonald (an Admin at WPW) has noticed more than average change in rankings on not only a daily basis, but from hour to hour. Since Mike has pointed this out I have been watching and have noticed the same thing for some queries I follow. I doubt this is the root of the John Chow issue, but I know something is weird about this to. Sure I know rankings are not stable for many different reasons like:

Personalization
Localization
Datacenters
etc, etc.

but this is ridiculous. Just researching for this blog posting I saw vastly different results for “John Chow“. Websites moving in and out of the top 10 and 20.

Any ideas?

Popularity: 20% [?]

Written by incrediblehelp on July 5th, 2007 with 2 comments.
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