You can Only Rely on Yourself
When trying to build a readership and traffic, you are essentially carrying an egg up a mountain. Things will try to knock the egg out of your hand and you’re the only one that can really keep things going. Your web host, for example, would be the weather. You can’t control the weather, and same with your hosting. You can have great hosting, dedicated servers and be dropping $250/mo for the best, but downtime happens.
Eggs are fragile. Weather can really put a dent in an egg. Well, sort off. The weather puts a dent in the carrier, who drops the egg, which dents the egg. Aside from the weak analogy, it shows you can’t be dependent on some things to keep your blog running and growing. A little downtime here and there, we’ll call it scattered showers, and you’ll wake up in the morning to see a dip in readers and traffic.
Search engines can also knock your egg off, so to speak. Recently, John Chow who had some impressive rankings including the #1 spot for “make money online” was slapped by Google. He virtually disappeared from all rankings, including his own name and that glorious “make money online” term. He reflected a couple days later saying “Live by t he Google, Die by the Google” and how you can’t rely on search engines for anything.
Though, in hindsight, he didn’t exactly use white hat methods to get up there. Tricking hundreds of users (including me) to review his site and give him some nice anchors and a little traffic, and even a Technorati bonus. The user, in return gets an anchor of their choice and the same benefits. Personally speaking, you’ll get maybe 40 hits out of it and no real bonus in terms of the promised “PR6 backlink” as that post will slip of his front page in a day or too.
Technorati punishes Chow, not listing him in their top 100 page. I don’t think he can really be one to be disappointed with these services, because he even admits constantly to use ‘evil’ methods.
Moral of the story: don’t put all your faith into something that could disappear in an instant, and don’t be too evil 
Leave a comment
L3ggy
July 2nd, 2007 at 5:07 PM
Good post. Hey why did you re-do the top commentators. Also what kind of stuff did he do?
Connor Wilson
July 2nd, 2007 at 5:13 PM
I’ve told you like 50 times, the top commenters gets reset at the beginning of each month, and always will.
Read his blog if you’re interested, but just simple power linking for one term. Maybe thats what got him penalized, too many links to the one term was interpreted as spam.
Andy
July 3rd, 2007 at 8:52 AM
Couldn’t agree more. Although on a much lesser scale I’m sure, I was getting a nice amount of traffic from Google at one point and then suffered a sharp drop. Just shows you can’t rely on these things.
Goob
July 3rd, 2007 at 12:51 PM
I always wondered why so many people bought into the “Write about John Chow” thing in the hopes that they’d get a nice PR6 link. Like you pointed out, the post with their link slips off the front page after only a day or two. It just never made sense to me. Don’t get me wrong, he’s wonderfully successful and that’s something, but people don’t seem to realize that one of the reasons he’s so successful is BECAUSE of all the people linking to him.
L3ggy
July 3rd, 2007 at 1:16 PM
It’s not right to do it. Use the simple old fasion way. Good content, Friends links, the odd payed link. Then slowly get your name out.
Andy
July 3rd, 2007 at 2:28 PM
It’s a pretty genius idea though. I don’t see a problem with it, people choose to take part.
L3ggy
July 3rd, 2007 at 3:05 PM
Yeah in a way i agree i don’t see what all the fuss is about bit still. The old fasion way is better
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