How to Rank in the Top 10 for John Chow

To my surprise, I noticed a John Chow article I posted sitting on page one of the results for a "John Chow" search at Google. This got me to thinking about how that one post out of 2,140,000 results made it up this high.



This will be more of an analysis than a proof. I have a PR0 blog and really not much going for it in terms of a large readership base. Heck, I do not even use a John Chow label/tag to promote his name with internal linking.



Examining the external links for the article sheds some light:

• A reference from a "John, I told you so" article I posted. His last name, Chow, does not appear anywhere in the post. I do reference two of John's posts though, this is a case of "you are what you link to". In this case, it is John Chow.
  
  
• Dawud's explanation of why John Chow's billing for DoFollow disappoints him. In this well articulated article, Dawud gave me the a strong anchor text link of simply John Chow. He references several other Chow related articles, but my link is the only one with his name in it. Very sweet Dawud!
• The nofollow proponent Blog Rumble post entitled Do Not Follow Me Please. was a loss of respect opinion. The link from here refrenced my blog name only, and was misspelled to boot ---Websubtractions. Gotta love that one! Still there were several "you are what you link" references.
• Proaffiliate's post was simple. They linked to me in both the Title and Body of the post, of which the only thing in the Body was just the link. Kewl! The title of the post was WebStractions: John Chow offers "paid" DoFollow links. That pretty much says it all.
• Last, but not least, Andy Beard's DoFollow | No Nofollow - Highs & Lows espoused John's Dofollow approach as one of the lowliest of the lows and likened him as a modern-day Internet version of Ghengis Kahn. Andy's link text did not include Chow's name, but there was plenty of Chow references before and after it. This is Chow by association, I guess, and is still giving many click-through action from his readers. Thanks again Andy.

You may have noticed a couple of references to "you are what you link" in there. I firmly believe that in absence of strong keywords in your link text, you will still get a benefit from what you are linking to. A mere link to any John Chow page will return you a relationship with, at the least, his name. Since most of the linking posts to my article did not have Chow's name in the link text. The articles themselves, however, were about Chow and that relation was passed onto me and Dawud's strong keytext and a power link from Andy added some punch.



None of this, however, explains the hows and whys of the high placement in the search results. It is safe to say that there should have been more authoritative blogs than mine to garner this position. Here is a list of various opponent reviews of John Chow from the Top 100.

• Scott Jangro's John Chow’s Dangerous Advice concerning Affiliate click fraud
• Arpit Jacob's John Chow Gets Kicked Out of Google which has a stance pretty much like mine in regards to artificially induced links (paid or otherwise)
• The IMDB on the actor John Chow which has nothing bad to say, but it doesn't have anything good. This has nothing to do with this John either. Just threw it in there to spread my John Chow relationship out.
• Josh Dorkin's beef on how John Chow Crashed my Browser again which oddly happens when he has 5-10 tabs open in Firefox. My suggestion is to install NoScript and AdBlock -- but reading his blog via a Reader is probably the safest .
• Somebody at Turk Hit Box saying that John Chow still needs to learn how to improve his Blog SEO. My question is WHY? With over 5500 readers reported by Feedburner, who needs Search Engines.
• Jim Kukral's John Chow is Killing his Blog by trying to hard to make money. And none of that seems to be sinking in with some of those 5500+ readers of his.

The rest of the Top 100 are all supportive raves and/or paid reviews. Lot of support for John,with very little negative feedback.



It was kind of odd that my article was the only one concerning the Pay-To-DoFollow links controversy. Would have thought there would be at least a couple of others in there.



While I do not think that ranking for John Chow in the results is one of my goals in life, it is comforting to know that at least one dissenting view of one of his particularly dangerous money making tips is showing up.







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