I looked carefully at the robot.txt files and I am still not convinced. Please answer my questions in this post

It might be possible that we are both wrong

I just got home and I will look deeper at the robots.txt files you mention. If you are right you are right. I don’t have any problem admitting anything.

I prefer to look at hard facts, that is all.

For example: http://www.tolnetwork.com/2007/john-chow-dot-com-part-ii/

This one, that you point out, isn’t even cached! http://howtosplitanatom.com/news/how-to-play-link-tag-with-john-chow/

Also, you correctly point out that robots.txt file problems usually drop your site out of the index all together. However, you incorrectly believe that’s not what happened. Just read the comments from Johns post about dropping out!

Comment by Nathan
2007-06-01 17:15:36
MyAvatars 0.2

Ummm, John.

have you done “site:http://www.johnchow.com” yet?

Your home page isn’t indexed anymore Reply to this comment
Comment by John Chow
2007-06-01 19:08:50
MyAvatars 0.2

Yes and I know what happen now. Expect to see me back at page 1 in a few days.

So… do you admit I’m right now?

Look at it now and look at the google cache of it.
No big mystery.

Thanks for your comment and for your subscription. The name is Hamlet
SEO Blog,

When you block search engines via your robots.txt file they don’t index you at all. John ranking dropped a few pages, not completely.

I am not sure how this proves your point. How about answering to the hard evidence I’m providing above? Why did those reviewers change the link text? I remember John was asking everybody to link with the same anchor text.

You might be right, but can you respond to my evidence?

To be fair to John, I have to say that it is hard to remain “open” when that can become a competitive disadvantage.

Please keep me posted when you launch your blog tag.

Personally, I plan on launching one of the biggest blog tags ever in a short while and I’ll keep you posted on that… we’ll see how that goes

Thanks for your comment.

>Oh for crying out loud… John Chow is all of the sudden an SEO expert >and so are all his faithful readers?

Using the word SEO on your blog name doesn’t make you an expert either.

Contrary to most SEOs that give advice, but do not reference any material or proof to back their claims, I actually analyzed his backlinks anchor text. I am not just hoping this to be the case.

>First of all, even if anchor text WERE John’s problem, emailing >reviewers would not solve the issue in two days. He’d have to have >sent out hundreds of emails and the reviewers would have had to >change >their links and Google would have had to spider them all in >two days. >That’s not happening.

Please do a search in Google for “freshbot”. Google does spider and index sites as frequently as that, if they meet the freshness criteria.

He didn’t need to email everyone that reviewed his site. Note that he does have their email addresses, as that is how they got in touch with him in the first place. He only needed to contact a few of them, preferably the ones with higher PageRank. With enough of them changing the link text, his inbound link text profile would not look so artificial.

>I commend you for trying but I’m willing to bet that wasn’t the >case.

Again, please provide some proof of whatever you claim.

I hope you were not the one that offered him help in exchange of US$4k.

First of all, even if anchor text WERE John’s problem, emailing reviewers would not solve the issue in two days. He’d have to have sent out hundreds of emails and the reviewers would have had to change their links and Google would have had to spider them all in two days. That’s not happening.

I commend you for trying but I’m willing to bet that wasn’t the case.

I felt it was necessary to share this.