Has everyone seen the commotion over what has happened to John Chow (JohnChow.com) and Text-Link-Ads.com? Since I used to read his business blog, I was going to do a post on John Chow and how he is going down the wrong path, but I decided against it. It was just going to be evil anyhow. Speaking of “evil”, John Chow can’t even rank for his own name on Google anymore. Google has knocked his block off, at least in their search results. It’s a good thing for John Chow that the majority of his traffic comes from sources other than Google. He’s always said, “don’t put all your eggs in the Google basket.” That’s never been more true for him than right now.

John Chow will have to come to the realization that Google can play games too. For months John had been accepting reviews of his site, in return giving you a “link back from a PR 6 site,” a tactic that this business blog will not partake in. Oh, let’s not forget that John also uses text link ads to sell horribly unrelated links on his front page. If you break Google’s rules they will slam you as hard as they can. Google basically got tired of John trying to pimp their page rank, so they knocked him around a bit and put the Google boot (size XXXL) where the sun doesn’t shine. On top of the fact that John Chow can’t even rank on page one for his own name, he can’t rank for his favorite search term “make money online” either. They put a little hurt on John Chow but the publicity he will get from this whole thing will probably just help him.

On top of that, Text-Link-Ads.com isn’t even ranking for the term “text link ads.” Wow, when Google says they don’t approve of people buying or selling links, what they really mean is they will kick you down their search results. What I did notice is that text-link-ads.com does have a little ad campaign going with Google, they happen to occupy the top spot. They can still buy links from Google apparently. What’s going to happen to the link buying industry? If Google has any say in it, the whole “text link ads” business model will just go away completely and sites like John Chow will go down in flames. Is this the new definition of “Google Bomb?”