it's nothing like banner ads. images aren't text links ... whether you call them links or ads makes no difference to a search engine.
@skattabrain + @mopacfan good to hear finally that other's have converns on flickering links... for the records: COOP ads helped out ... but not to the extend as static links do... well... and reading up on temporal link analysis helps... http://einat.webir.org/JASIS_2004_Temporal_Links_Analysis.pdf (altough I DO NOT say that exactly THIS algo is in google&co... also for the records... before another one shouts out a big LIAR) jez
@noppid: did you use the link-vault system already? did you review their integration code... that's very professional from my POV
Lots of site owners that have never been in the Coop are saying similar things. It may be that the Coop isn't responsible for either the Google sandbox effect OR the relative MSN and Yahoo success... I doubt it. And how would you account for all those sites in the sandbox that have never even HEARD of the coop? In my opinion, too many people take an overly simplified/simplistic view of what is causing poor showing in Google vs. MSN/Yahoo... It takes a lot of eggs to make a good omelet...
while i agree 100% on your google comment, msn and yahoo are easily manipulated with coop. you can turn up the weight in coop and watch msn climb day by day ... although i've heard reports of it slowing down on msn. but coop aside, for a while back, i was able to own MSN for my fields using all on page SEO. MSN loves CSS, as well as clean, well formed code and keyword rich content.
I won't disagree, skattabrain. I'm seeing benefits of the coop on all search engines and my sites have been around long enough and have been fairly stable in their SE rankings for long enough that I am reasonably convinced the coop gets at least some credit for that.
Except this part -- yes to keyword rich content... but I have yet to see anything which convinces me that any SE cares about CSS or validated code (I know you didn't use the word validated but many who make this observation have), as long as it's not buggy code... i.e., if it's error free, I don't think spiders give a damn if you're using CSS or tables.
I think msn may have a limit on keyword richness I have had site drop some places when I cranked up the keyword density, I also had a site rise a bit when I lowered it. I'm not really sure it ws directly related
Well, minstrel. I never said that sandbox is affecting ONLY coop sites. I just think that getting 100,000 coop links in one day, and having only dynamic links pointing to your site might put you into sandbox. Be it because of getting too many links in too short time or because those links are not static = they do not fit to 'natural linking schema' makumba
well i am number 2 for my target phrase and 86 without the filter. I am clearly being penalised for something, but i dont know what? I cant be sandboxed, not after 14 months, but i have had abroken link on my site for 9 months, and i presume that is the cause, it was fixed 3 hours ago, how long before google undoes the broken link penalty? roughly?
Okay. Someone just red-repped me for this: with the comment Would you care to give examples and/or explain just how that is possible? Unless they are broken internal links preventing Googlebot from finding the rest of your site, I certainly have never heard of a "broken link penalty" but I'm willing to be "educated"
for the sole pupose of being facetious, last time i checked ... google still hasn't published it's manual on how to get to #1 for all of our friendly seo's. it's not too hard to visualize some sort of negative rep added to a site that, when indexed, appears broken and littered with 404's all the time.
It's not to hard to fantasize that Google penalizes pages that contain the words "mugwump" or "heffalump" or that have backlinks using those words in anchor text either. But where's the evidence? It's always fun to speculate but the speculation should at least have a little basis in reality.
There is a thread on SEO chat where someone said that fixing a few bad links on their site raised their rankings. As with everything SEO, its hard to determine cause and effect though. You can only make educated assumptions.