It’s been surprising to know that John Chow’s keywords like “make money online” or “making money online” are up for grabs. Couple of months ago he was bragging that JohnChow.com was Number One when searching those keywords even beating the Problogger.com. It was one of his greatest accomplishments aside pocketing money from his blog.We all know that he uses a scheme which was very successful. He encourages other bloggers to review his blog and in return he will give them backlinks. A review trading for Pr6 backlink is enticing. So all of those who wanted a backlink from him participated.

John Chow had used the “Google bomb” scheme which was popularized in United States during the 2000 and 2004 election. Here’s the meaning:

Google bomb is Internet slang for a certain kind of attempt to influence the ranking of a given page in results returned by the Google search engine, often with humorous or political intentions. Because of the way that Google’s algorithm works, a page will be ranked higher if the sites that link to that page use consistent anchor text. A Google bomb is created if a large number of sites link to the page in this manner.

An example of this was the attempted usages of anchor text using ‘miserable failure’ pointing it to George W. Bush’s biography page. It means when somebody searches ‘miserable failure’, the number one result would be Bush’s page.

Interestingly Google responded January 25, 2007 to minimize any future Google bombs. Did John Chow aware of Google bombs? Though his keywords was really on his blog, still Google treated it as an act of Google bomb.

John Chow was crying on his blog that Google slapped him, he is lucky though that only a slap on the face is what he gets from bombing Google.

Was the disappearance of Chow’s in the first page an algorithm response or a personal response of Google? That we don’t know.