I thought I would share an experience with the coop ad network and rotating anchor text. First using the coop, I targeted a fairly competitive three word keyword, "blue widget free" with a new page that I created for one of my sites. After two months, I was on the 1st page on Google. This was really a test for me on how the coop could work for my sites. I did very little in terms of getting other sites to link to the page and of course I did some internal linking. So I decided to go after a related but much more competitive three word keyword which was a variation of the originial, "best blue widgets" with 50% more weight for the new keyword. I made the change about two weeks ago. So I dropped "blue widget free" from the coop and but kept my internal linking the same and did not go out seek to change the outside links to the new keyword variation. I know it is a bit early to draw any conclusions. But after two weeks, I am on the third page for the new keyword "best blue widgets". A nice result and shows the power of the coop. However, I was suprised [maybe others will not be] that my dropped keyword "blue widget free" continued to stay on the 1st page of Google and eventually climbed to the #3 position where it has now settled for the past week. Have others seen this type of behaviour?
What I have noticed is a "dragging" up of minor KWPs across the board to relatively high positions [first 10] and perhaps this is the effect that you are seeing here - one can only tell after a period of time tho.
I have been paying close attention as well. When I started the network, I was #14 for "as seen on tv" - I had a weight of 20,000 or so and I had 4 ads. So Each ad had a weight of 5,000 (approx). I moved up from #14 to #9; sometimes I'd move up as far as #7. My weight is approx 65,000 now. I have 5 ads now. Each one has a an effective weight of 13,000 or so (with 1 with very little weight) - I've moved up on that same word to #6 sometimes I hit #5 depending on the day. It seems to take about a month for the effect to kick in, so I expect things to improve slowly over time.
To be honest I have oftern wondered about this but havnt gotten around to testing it yet. since youve had good results I will probably give it a shot.
It would make sense to keep high rankings after you had a ton of links from various sources aimed at it but then dropped. It might tell Google it was a quality resource hence getting all those links. But it wasn't a lasting topic. Like news. News articles get a lot of 'latest news' links from automated scripts (like the 5 latest threads on the KWT). But when they are replaced by new articles the links change and the old article doesn't have that many links coming in anymore. But that doesn't mean the article isn't a quality one anymore! Perhaps this explanation of linking behaviour could explain the drag and/or prolonged high rankings. Make sense?
TOPS30 - very interesting and this could could explain why I have seen some web pages with 1st page rankings with a relatively small number of backlinks right now. I wonder how long these links "stick" for SERP purposes. Who really knows... but I wonder if my keyword has staying power because the two key words "blue widget free" & "best blue widgets" are closely related.
I think that has a lot to do with it, since 2 of the 3 words in the anchor text are the same. I'm sure you would see a drop if you changed all of the anchor text (do you dare to test that ? ). But, the fact that you have so many links pointing to that page (no matter the anchor text) and good on-page optimization (I'm assuming), I'm sure these things contribute to your KW's doing well in the serps. Anchor text isn't everything.
Wow, a389951l, great post with your detailed results. I've been testing also for about 4 or 5 weeks and have gotten similar results, but I can offer a few more details from my results. In case 1, I targeted both a competitive keyword of 40,000 searches a month (widget calendar) and a much less competitive keyword of 4000 searches a month (widget test). My overall weight is 7000. After 10 days in the network, I popped from >200 to position # 30 and #12, respectively. In case 2, I decided that I should concentrate my linking weight on my widget index page (the second level index tiering to all widget pages) so that I could give all of my pages (about 100) a slowly building bump in the SERPs. Whoa! Big mistake! After about 10 days, I dropped for my two test keywords from #30/#12 to #140/#70 and did not see any appreciable increase in the SERPs for my other widget pages. Conclusion? I believe that the network will work best for you in the following way: 1) target ads to specific valuable keyword pages with suitable anchor text, and 2) your total site links will be building up over time regardless of which internal pages you've targeted, so overall SERPS should slowly improve over time (but less dramatically than the targeted pages). Hope this helps someone else -- I just finished re-posting my targeted ads in the network!
I am planning to test that very scenario after the holiday season is over. So dare accepted but you'll have to wait a few months. Hmm... anchor text isn't everything, I do agree to an extent. But based on what I have seen recently, it does seems to be a large part of the equation.
Just a quick update to my orginial post. "blue widget free" - has now dropped to #9 in google - this was the dropped backlink. "best blue widgets" - is now #13 on the second page from the third page.