Google Updating Algorithm
written by John Chow
It looks like there is some kind of Google Algorithm update going on. I am no longer ranked number one for the term, “make money online.” Depending on the Google server you’re on, I’m anywhere from the 12th to 50th spot (thanks to everyone who alerted me BTW).
It seems I’m not the only one affected by the latest change. Matt Jones at of Affiliate Programs and Internet Scams reports his site is experiencing Google changes as well.
I hadn’t been ranked for my main term ‘affiliate programs’ but I suddenly popped up on page 3 today! I have checked a few times today to make sure and sometimes my site is page 3, then if I check again a literally 1 minute later it will have disappeared. I guess they are still sorting the algorithm change.
Also I was sent reports that my PR dropped from 4 to 0, but the Google Toolbar still says 4 (and I don’t see why it would drop).
Strange goings on!
I can only assume the changes are designed to discount all the waves of review for linkback, technorati trains, alexa trains, etc. Google didn’t get to be the number one search engine by staying still. You should check the positions of the keywords you were after and see where they are now.
With the algorithm change, I’ve decided to put a stop to my review for linkback promotion. All reviews received to date will be posted, but I will no longer accept new reviews. I may bring the promotion back at a later date with some changes. However, I’m going to take a wait and see for now.
Not being ranked number one for make money online won’t make the drastic change in my traffic. The term sent me about 150 people a day. A nice amount, but very tiny compared to the over 11,000 that read this blog everyday.
Find out what I am doing right now by following me on Twitter! If you like this post then please consider subscribing to my full feed RSS. You can also subscribe by Email and have new posts sent directly to your inbox.
(9 votes, average: 4 out of 5)
Loading ...
Here's A Few More Related Posts
Was I one the first to alert u?
I am sure this is some temp. change with Google…You will be back at top with your keywords 
I hope it’s not too temporary! I’ve moved up to no. 63 for ‘make money online’!
One of my sites was disappeared for a couple of keywords…its back on top now
Hope same is with John…his blog will be back on top again 
My site disappears for couple of days whenever I modify my title. I loose a lot of visitors when it happens, up to 400 or more per day.
Ummm, John.
have you done “site:http://www.johnchow.com” yet?
Your home page isn’t indexed anymore
Yes and I know what happen now. Expect to see me back at page 1 in a few days.
weird,
you still have the first place here.
nice find from India.
I can’t find jc for “make money online” on page 1.
This is pretty bad.
I agree, this is probably just a limited minor set back. you’ll be back on top again John
Doubtful that it’s temporary. It was actually Google bombing and Google simply adjusted their algorithm to recognize that. They adjust this continually.
As of January 25th of this year Google implemented a specific algorithm that minimizes Google bombs. That change finally removed the well-known “miserable failure” link to the White House from the front page.
BTW John, I’d say to definitely continue with the reviews…just don’t require any specific anchor text to be used in them. That’s what Google notices and adjusts for.
This same thing happened to me many months ago when I was marketing the keyword: Rolex Watches. I was listed number one for months! Then all of a sudden… not listed at all. Learning from that experience, I then started banking on marketing long-tail keywords rather than just one specific group of keywords.
I noticed the affects of this change too… however, for the positive. My personal blog (my name links to it) suddenly appears on page 3 under my chosen keyword phrase I am marketing.
My good friend George is now listed in third place for Make Money Online.
Aaron, I’m not sure what you consider Google bombing but this isn’t it. Google bombing is when you make a site rank for a term that doesn’t contain that keyword at all. The most famous example is of course Miserable Failure bringing up the white house website. In this case though, John has the phrase “make money” all over the site. Therefore, that’s not the issue in this case.
I wonder how this will affect sponsored reviews like those from PayPerPost and Reviewme, could this be the end to their services?
I don’t think anything is sure yet.
Thats a good question.
The key I think is the relevancy of any topic we post about.
Maybe this is the wakeup call for some.
Quality and value.
Hard to tell so soon. I don’t have enough to data to get a feel for what’s going on yet.
Early indicators for me though is that there’s no visible shift. They might just be further enforcing their Google bomb nerfing efforts. That would have a likely side effect of decreasing the value of identical backlinks which the sponsored programs have lots of. That would seem in line with the threats that Cutts has been issuing lately.
Who knows. I’ll know where I stand in a few days.
I think a red flag was about to go up sometime or the other. I mean 700 link backs all from blogs with a huge amount of them having “make money online” as anchor texr would even put Microsoft’s algorithm on notice.
I guess it was only a matter of time.
The key to this kind of campaign is to allow the bloggers to vary the link phrase. too many that are exactly identical are indeed an easy to spot red flag.
I’ve been mixing my anchor text up using about three different but similar phrases. I based it on John’s model. I hope they bring some value for my desired keywords.
it will bring value and good results over time as you add more content
We need to ‘hear’ well the voice of this wake up call.
For me, I remain unshakeable like mt. Zion, for my search terms. I am still #1 page 1 for The Gardener’s Daughter and La Hija del Jardinero. And, they are still bringing between 250 to 500 daily organic visitors to my blog.
Let’s give Google a couple of more days before we begin any deep anaylis of the new trend.
Is a linkback all that publishers want? They publicity and traffic is WAY MORE VALUABLE!
Do you think it affect PR ranking? Maybe they will reset PR after the testing is finished.
I just need my review(May 3) be up by then in case it does not affect PR ranking.
Algorithm changes don’t affect PageRank. PageRank is calculated based on number and quality of links to a certain webpage. PageRank is only one part of the algorithm Google uses to rank webpages.
What happen?
That’s really strange. One of my sites seems to have been positively affected (now ranks #3 for keyword). Other than that, I haven’t noticed any major rankings change.
Although, traffic has seemed to have slowed down lately.
[...] Más información en JohnChow [...]
WoW :O lol John you got enough Evil
now its time for Google to get Evil
Like Google says, Don’t be Evil!
They mean that for them mostly, but I think now it can be applied to us Internet folk as well.
Hello, you think John’s Mind is not upto some new
?
I wouldn’t stop your review for link exchange program. It probably gets you more traffic than being ranked for Make Money Online. I’d stop forcing people to link back to you with the term “make money online” as that is probably what set off the penalties you’re now experiencing.
Yeah, I’d just change anchor text every week or so. I don’t think it’ll affect you long term, but all those backlinks from blogs can’t hurt!
Besides you said that make money online high ranking only drives 1.4% of your traffic.
I wonder how much traffic is generated by the blogs that did a review for a linkback. I am sure they have more than one post linking to the Master of Evil
I agree. I don’t see a reason to stop the promotion, just change the rules to take out the “make money online” requirement. Exposure and name recognition can be just as good as a google ranking.
I think so, too — the link exchange review program is a unique characteristic of your blog, John. You might want to change the rules up a bit, but not necessarily take it out altogether.
Come on, maybe is an internal error in Google. I hope they dont change the algorithm…
They are always changing their algorithm. It may not affect a particular site all the time, but there are always changes going on.
It’s pretty amazing how quickly Google is able to adapt to this stuff. Knowing you, however, you’ll come up with a new system in no time!
- Mike
Quickly? Google’s been battling this kind of SEO strategy for years and years. John’s given new incentive to help it along, but at the end of the day, it’s essentially Google bombing.
Trust John, he would come up with new evil ways to keep the pace for the race
.
Google podría estar actualizando su algoritmo de busqueda
Google podría haber actualizado su algoritmo de búsqueda. Algunos keywords que daban ciertos resultados en la primera página, han sido movidas a las páginas 4 y 5. Parece ser, que el nuevo algoritmo está ignorando las keywords con links, está ign…
I was actually expecting this sort of thing… Google doesn’t like “google bombs” or other similar things where a ton of sites are linking to a certain site all using the same anchor text.
I would suggest that if you reactivate the review link exchange that you give people a choice of maybe 3-5 anchor texts that people can use when linking back to your blog John. You might also want to spread the link love and let people link to random blog posts instead of the front page of your blog.
I’ve mainly seen an increase in ranking on many of my sites in the last few days so it looks like the updated algorithm likes what I’m doing
I wouldn’t even limit it to 3-5. I’d leave it wide open with some vague instruction as to what you’d like the theme to be.
Then again, this could be the result of reciprocal nerfing as well…
I agree Marc. The more natural the better. If there’s any pattern at all Google will eventually pick up on it, whether on their own, or from those who watchdog this sort of stuff and report it back to them.
Don’t kill your blog John
!
My sites have been all over the place also. Definitely some Algo changes.
Moe
BlastYourAss.com
“A Place to Make Money With No BS”
It’s not just PR and not just ranking on search results, the supplemental pages from my site have doubled
and John pages from your site have also doubled in supplemental results 
I think the algorithm is checking the number of backlinks for page/site and doing some drastic changes, shall know by tomorrow!
Curses and I just posted my review about and hour ago. I wonder if I made the cut?
I once read that if you rise to fast in a certain very populated keywords that you can get penalized in Google for it. 5-10 a day is good while 20,000 over night is bad.
Interesting turn of events. Almost a month ago the same thing happened to my blog. I don’t have a clue what happened. I was in the top 10 results for a lot Aeroplan and Airmile, Nintendo DS Homebrew, and some photography searches as well. I had 150 uniques one day and the next I had 25. Not a single search engine result from Google.
Interesting thing is that even though my traffic was cut by so much, because I diversified my revenue sources, I am only going to be off by about 10% to 15% this month. My traffic from RSS readers and the other search engines seem to click fairly consistently and I have some non-fluctuating sources like PayU2Blog and PayPerPost.
I’m still trying to figure it out though. I’m still publishing as consistent as I can and will probably go back to submitting posts to article directories like I did just before Google decided to love me and leave me.
Oh yeah…and just prior to the drop off in traffic from Google (like a week before), my PageRank went from 1 to 2.
Although I never participated in your review-linkbacks (did link to couple of your posts though), I still thought you were getting plenty of inbound links for Google juice.
As someone pointed out, it would be better if there are many inbound links to different parts of your blog (e.g. different posts) instead of just the homepage. I think google differentiates between blogroll links (typically to the homepage) and within-post links (preferably to specific content with relevant anchor text, title, and alt-text).
Bottomline: content that brings back visitors and make them link to you always wins.
To be honest, John I used to love your blog few months back for blogging tips and blog tweaks but lately I have been seeing lot of ‘Make Money Online’ lists and ReviewMe reviews which I almost always marked as read in my RSS feeder. I hope this change in Google algorithm brings back the old John Chow that I loved to read. Just my $0.02.
I would still like to see you do the blog reviews John. Although Google may have changed their way of conducting search, you should not steer away any potential traffic other blogs can pull in for you the same way you can send traffic to them by exchanging reviews.