July 17th, 2009 Add Your Comments Bookmark and Share

It’s not very often I do a post looking back over the week but there have been a couple of stories around this niche of ours that have stood out this week.

First of all has been the story of John Chow and how he’s back in Google’s good books. Well done John! For those that don’t know John got penalised years ago for selling links and some dodgy link exchanges. He used this to his advantage and to help build his reputation as the evil blogger. A couple of weeks ago people started noticing the domain johnchow.ca appearing in the big G’s search results. It was fairly obvious that John was 301′ing Googlebot to a new domain that contained a “legit” copy of his blog. Isn’t this cloaking the webmaster community complained? Of course it was and John duly found that domain banned and johnchow.com penalised even harder. So you may be wondering what the master of evil and Google’s arch enemy did to suddenly get back in to the index and have his page rank restored all the way up to a 5. What evil cunning plan did he use to shove it to Google this time? Well actually John Chow went crying like a baby to Matt Cutts. After promising to be nice, Matt agreed to put a re-inclusion request through for John and the rest as they say is history. The lesson here is simple, if you want back into Google / your visible page rank restored then go and cry to Matt Cutts. I already have my begging letter ready and waiting (PR1 my arse!)

The second story although not as big is something even more important as far as I’m concerned. This week saw the launch of a new program by renowned marketers Chris Rempel and Dave Kelly. Their new software called the Authority Loophole made promises of high page rank, one way links for fun. How did it achieve this? Easily as it turned out because all it did was simply find WordPress blogs that were using the top commenter plug-in. There is/was a bug in this plugin that allows users to hi-jack the list. Just create a comment using a name already on the list with your URL and you’re done. Of course this caused great upset amongst a number of bloggers who suddenly found themselves being bombarded with crappy comments as people competed for the names already in the top commenters list. I got it hit myself and had to delete several comments. I take it some of this shit found its way back to Chris who was quick to write an apology. Not as it turns out for what happened but that the wrong manual went out with the software! Of course it did Chris (cough)! Instead of using the program to simply screw up peoples top commenters list what you were actually supposed to do was use the software to locate blogs using the top commentator plugin but then leave enough genuine comments to get in the list. Now you could of course use an advanced query string in the search engines to do this yourself but why bother when you can download the software (which is free by the way)? Either way this “system” was another huge case of marketing blurb over substance, all I can say is it’s a good job he didn’t try and sell it – that would be a charge back nightmare.

Soo all in all an interesting week. I’ve been very busy working on several things, mainly top secret for now. One thing I can say though is that I’m back using a much improved version of ShoeMoney Tools. You may remember that I was one of the very earliest beta users and was left less than impressed by what ShoeMoney had put together. Tempted by the latest $3.95 offer I’ve decided to give it another go and everything looks and works much better than before. Put it this way within 24 hours of using just 1 tool I turned $4 of traffic into over $120 of affiliate commission. There’s probably a password protected post in there somewhere ;)

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