SpamOrNot: John Chow dot Com
In this first installment of SpamOrNot, where I try to determine if a site is web spam, I’m going to look at John Chow dot Com.
In the interest of full disclosure, I should tell you that John was running a blog review contest. While my “review” has missed the deadline to win the prize, I am still hoping that he honors his commitment to continue giving backlinks. Sorry, but as a new blog I just can’t resist getting some linkjuice/exposure from a blog of John’s stature.
John’s blog got so much attention by taking advantage of the abundance of traffic on digg, delicious, and reddit. Several of his posts made it to the front page of digg, bringing an onslaught of readers, including myself; I first found out about John’s blog on digg.
The attention did have a backlash, however. John’s blog was banned from digg because too many members marked it as spam. How can a blog that so many diggers love be expelled?
Well, if you take one look at John Chow dot Com, you can see why members marked it as spam.
The advertisements slap you in the face. He has a small Adsense banner going across the top, a large Adsense rectangle intertwined with his content, and he’s running TextLinkAds on the sidebar.
And this is all above the fold!
Scrolling down, you see there are more large Adsense blocks, Feedburner ads, as well as his own TTZ media ads. If you subscribe to his RSS Feed, you’ll see he has Feedburner ads integrated there as well.
If that wasn’t enough, John also publicly stated that his endorsement can be bought and sold!
At least John is not shy about his spammyness. Every month he brags reports the earnings he received from his blog, and they’re not too shabby!
All that being said, John is a respected member of the internet community and his blog is one of the most interesting and well-thought-out commentaries on running an online business.
The final call on John’s blog is that it is NotSpam, despite the fact his ad quantity and placement would make the guys at Syndk8 blush.
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