Few days back I wrote a post on why we shouldn’t try to manipulate Google, in that post I also wrote about the recent penalty that has been levied by Google on John Chow. However it seems the penalty is doing him more good, than bad!

How?

Well for starters I have visited his blog more times in past week then I did in past one year, and being the cleaver marketer/manipulator he is, he has managed to swing this penalty into his favor, by becoming a sort of pariah and has kicked off his PR exercise into high gear. Something which is quite evident from his recent blog posts.

For instance a day after he posts “It’s All About Pushing The Limit”, he talks about being covered by BC Magazine and the fact he just bought a new Acura. Kind of posts a make money online blog reader wants to read and believe in. Not to mention all the exposure and publicity he is been getting in blogs and forums due to this penalty.

While people are saying that Google is trying to make an example out of him, what they are actually projecting is, John Chow has become so important an individual that Google could actually think about imposing a manual penalty!

Well only the Big G knows if the penalty was a manual one or if they really want to make an example out of him, all this has done is, take the brand “John Chow”, to a new height.

While John must be enjoying the whole spectacle and hoping this new buzz carries on, there are others who are trying to leverage this situation to their advantage.

Take for example, Patrick Altoft from BlogStorm.co.uk. He was the first person to come up with Adwords ad targeting keyword John Chow. The ad points to Blogstorm’s; Beginners guide to link baiting, which itself is quite a link bait. However rather than stopping there, Patrick went ahead and ordered a review of his blog from John Chow! Some thing which John Chow did and to leverage this even further, Patrick has recently posted “How John Chow can get his Google ranking back”. Knowing fully well, this is the kind of stuff that would appeal to the audience that he has managed to build up in past few days through the “John Chow fiasco”.

So here are two different individuals from different parts of the world, trying to leverage a situation which other wise would have been the final nail to the coffin of most blogs and websites and they are making money out of it!

As for The Big G, well they have succeeded in sending out a strong message to webmasters, that we better start playing according to their rules if we want all that free traffic from them.