| May 30 |
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John Chow is, quite possibly, the devil. His blog johnchow.com is dedicated to how much money he makes online, how he makes his money online and also, how awesome he is for making so much money online. Seeing a recurring pattern here?
Famously he’s recently had the idea of charging people to remove the nofollow attribute from their comment links. Now I know this might be stating the obvious, but wasn’t the nofollow attribute designed to prevent comment spam, and improve the quality of search engine SERPS?
Recently he has also had the bright idea of bribing people with backlinks in order to get them to use the words ‘make money online’ in his anchor text. Clearly this is done to fool Google and I’m surprised that he hasn’t been banned yet for this behaviour.
My pet hate today is people who write blog posts purely to target keywords. This sort of content for the sake of content is watering down the internet slowly but surely. It’s becoming rarer and rarer to see people writing because they want to express an opinion, or simply want to help others.
John isn’t the worst culprit though. At least his content is original, well written and, in some cases, useful to readers. The real prize has to go out to those invisible profiteers who are tirelessly plagiarising our content as we speak and re-posting it, plastered in adverts, all over the blogosphere.
That is not to say that I think it’s wrong to make a few bucks from your efforts. I think all bloggers should include one or two ads and get some compensation for their efforts. The main thing is to make sure your heart is in the right place and that you’re adding a positive contribution to the internet, rather than a negative one.
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