If all someone had to do was go out and pay for 1000’s reviews they would dominate the search engine.

Just my thought great post.

A good example is

“the internet’s biggest google whores”

That search brings up a lot of stuff related to JC, that was probably his most popular post…. but no direct link to JC.

I think this is different to the last penalty he had, which seemed more keyword specific…. this time it seems as thought his site has been penalized across the board…

The losses of 150 hits per day were for specific keywords, his total SE traffic was a lot higher… over 60k visitors per month I believe… I would imagine mostly from google….

Thanks for your comment. I think that would be very unfortunate for your visitors. For me, visitors come first.

If Google finds duplicate content in your blog, the worst that could happen is Google listing your category page in the results instead of the actual post. To prevent this I simply block access to the category pages via robots.txt or meta robots noindex tag.

My take on supplemental pages is very different from the majority of SEOs. I plan to write a detailed post about it soon.

Does it make a difference?

Do you believe reducing suplemental pages has a positive effect though, it seems an open issue from what I have read… I suppose the answer is to try it like you are…

What I am saying is that by following John Chow’s links Google can find other bloggers doing the same thing. Sounds like a good time to stop.

Preventing Googlebot from accessing duplicate content pages is a good way to reduce the number of pages in the supplemental index. I did not change my robots.txt. I used the meta robots noindex tag.

I was thinking the same thing today regards his reviewers… are you implying that john chow is becoming a bad neighborhood?

Review for a linkback was a bit of a scam anyway IMO.

Another thing I wanted to ask you was your opinion on the supplemental pages. You say you have modified your robots file, do you know whether this has an impact?

Jez