Matt cutts responds to shoemoney mentions "co-operative link networks"

IN response to shoemoney asking why his site was penalized.



Matt Said,

December 30, 2005 @ 12:42 pm

Shoemoney, the site that you mentioned in your other comment looked like it had been involved in a lot of co-operative link networks and such? If you’re not involved in that stuff any more, I’d file a reinclusion request for the site.




even though we call it co-operative advertising network i think he menas the coop yeah?

 

Can you give a link to where Shoe talks about this? How do you know the answer, why doesn't Shoe post it himself, I'm confused I miss something?

 

http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/seo-mistakes-not-checking-your-site/

 

WOW, thanks for the link

 

Thanks Nintendo - that is a REALLY interesting thread. So, time to start pointing weight at competitors? Just kidding.... I would expect the worst case to be "neutral" effect at Google.

 

How much weight would be safe? Under 1K or is that too much?

 

No kidding ! I would think that Google has to look at various factors including massive amounts of links before shelling out a penalty.

 

Actually I will remove my coop.

Google is getting too good.

First delist my ODP clone and my weight went down by 90% and now this.

But I like that Google is getting better.

 

I for one would like more clarity from Google in this regard. The co-op network is an advertising venue that has paid off for me. I don't think that DP is avert to updating the network to make it friendly to google, but why would you penalize a site for advertising? There are plenty of paid advertising services that look similar to the coop network. Are these all penalized as well, or is it just a select few? What makes one "google friendly" versus on that is penalized?

I, like many other webmasters, have to advertise. The coop network is free. What specifically is wrong with it? I can see discounting the effectiveness of any inbound coop network links, but to penalize a site just because they have inbound coop network links is crazy.

 

If you read matt cutts' answer, he mentioned several coop ad networks. Perhaps its the several part that triggers a penalty.

 

I agree 100%. To devalue the links would be the sensible thing IMO.

VERY interesting point.

Where is Shoemoney?

 

just read through the post on matts blog ... and the interesting thing is the comment of:

... the site that you mentioned in your other comment looked like it had been involved in a lot of co-operative link networks and such ... (note the plural on networks)

Shoemoney is not a BlackHater and seems pretty much on the UP and UP from what i've seen ... I suspect perhaps a little too much weight from the CO-OP, too many links in small period of time, perhaps using the same allin, may have triggered a G filter. (I MAY be totally off by this comment). Shoe would be best to comment.

If the co-op was a problem I think we would have more chatter about it on these forums. But most importantly I think Shawn et al would probably give us a heads up as soon as it was validated or confirmed to be true.

I've seen other SEOs go nuts on getting tons of links through other means, too quickly and using the same allin and have seen them get blasted off google. The important thing is that Google looks for natural link patterns, not 200 links a week.

I would not panic about leaving the co-op network just yet.

cheers
frank

 

Here are the facts on this case:

I did not have any coop ads running on the site in question.

Also the site is not droped from google... it just doesnt rank where it was. Instead of #2 for a top 10 most searched for phrase on the internet its like #12 right now. Its a weird penalty. its like google said-

"Ok, Dont let this site rank for anything in the top 10 results"

After clarification it appears the cooperative linking being specified by Matt was my all my very similar sites linking to each other. The use of the word coop appears to be ironic. I am gong to file a request like he asked and I will post when I know more.

 

Thanks Shoemoney for clearing the air!

 

Good post frank.

Just a bit off-topic about unnatural links:

I did a test on this some weeks ago, it is still ongoing but here is some interesting info:

I launched two different new articles sites pretty much the same time.
On the first one I within 2 days linked it from 35 different web sites, 2 PR 7, 10 PR 5 etc - like crazy, using 3 different anchors. MSN shows 8,296 backlinks.

The second one I just linked from maybe 8 sites, about half of them PR 5, rest lower PR.

Guess what happened?

First site: Google is refusing to even index it.
Second site: Fully indexed in Google and get relatively good traffic from Google and ranks well on some phrases.

Interesting, isn't it ...

Thanks shoe for the post.

 

Jim,

Mind posting URL's to these sites ?

I'm curious about on page factors vs off page. It's also possible you managed to get an 'off theme' IBL from an unrelated authoritative site. That'll screw things bigtime as well (especially when a site is going live for the first time).

Oh Shoemoney - thanks for clearing this BTW - The last thing I wanted to do was go frantically poking around MCs blog on new years eve.

Cheers,

JL

 

Sure, they are quite "cheap":

First site: www.netmarketing.us (not even home page listed, but Googlebot spiders the site like a crazy. 2K articles.)
Second site: www.webrelatedarticles.com (for example #9 rank on webmaster articles, about 300 articles)

 

How many pageviews a day does that one get? That looks like one of the cheap sites we all bought from cdrinteractive's 150 Adsense Sites thread!!! Less than $1.00 is really nice!!

 

Hehe.

I bought it cheap but before I knew there were hundreds of these ones out there - if I knew that I would have bought it even cheaper.

It gets about 20-30 uniques from Google per day. Quite interesting actually considering that these articles are all around the net.

 

thanks jim ... i'm sure that if you took your sites and tweaked them a bit more (on page tweaking) they would do even better. BTW I bought the same package too. Seriously spend a little time tweaking and you should recoup the original investment fairly quickly. Add some original content and you are off to the races.

cheers
Frank