There are some evidence of links having more weight in Google if they are a little older. Of course, there's no real evidence of that, it might just be a seo myth, but it sure makes sense to me. If i'd work at google I'd think that a very fast way to detect artificial links would be to see if links appear and dissapear over night. Anyway, i was wondering if the coop network could be configured to keep an ad link on a website for a couple of days (maybe weeks), to get some age. I know taht for Shawn this means a lot more work, but the immediate benefits would be that the server would have a lot less workload.... Just my opinion....
As far as I know G is counting all the links.... even if they appear or dissapear over night.... I had once a link like that and G even showed it within my backlinks... and showing it now also, though it is long time gone... But, my point is that internaly G is keepin in mind every link. And this Network was not built for you to have more BL on G, but to rank better for some keywords... And (I don't speak from my own experience here) as far as I know it works The only thing that I think the Co-op needs now is to make caregories for the sites that list links in the network, not only for the links themselves.... and a more complex categories structure would help improve the quality of links even better
many of the links do remain as far as google is concerned. Reason being, on forum sites especially, google doesnt respider pages on large sites very often. So if google spiders one of sy pages today - It may not respider it for a month, two, or even longer. And google thinks those coop links are still there the whole time.
I do believe that the links may remain in google's cache even if they dissapeared the second after the spider it's gone. However, it definitely makes sense for G not to give much weight to brand new links, especialy if they dissapear over night. Eventualy this will be a filter in their algo and i'd hate to see the whole network trip this filter....
If you look at the McDar thread there seems to be some real evidence that Google is a lot slower taking links down than in recognizing them in the first place. I think the underlying assumption in their algorithm must be that a link is semi permanent. If that is true then the coop network is exploiting this assumption.
Im sure it wouldn't be hard for google to spider pages twice in quick sucession instead of once to check for different links on second visit. Though this would obviously increase serverload by 100%!
I think it may help our cause if links remained on any given page for a longer period ogf time. I wondered if this is easily accomplished with the programming? Can the period of time be, say 24 hours? I was checking bl's on Yahoo yesterday my number 1 bl was a coop link as well as several others were in the top 20 out of 11,000. Today they are gone. I am not sure if increasing the length of time an ad would display may help the actual weight of the link itself.
Frankly, given the success of many who use the co-op, I would imagine that Google and others aware aware of how the co-op works. (besides that it works great!). There is no question that this co-op gives backlinks from distinct domains, with anchor text. Exactly what the Search Engines give you high popularity for having. Once the spider vitsits and finds a link to your site, it indexes it and gives your site the credit for that link and anchor text... however it is determined. This is the only system I have come across where someone can quickly and easily get this accomplished. Again, it is great at what it does. It won't be long before Google and perhaps others will be trying to discount the credit given to a site that participates in the co-op. The won't announce it, or ban you for linking from it, they will just find a way to decrease the value of inbound links they can identify as originating from the co-op. This will definately happen someday as the co-op grows. You can bet on it. So today I was thinking... how cold they identify links that originate from the co-op... Easy.... Crawl a page twice in quick succession and if the links change from one nano second to the next... then it is a co-op site. Once it is identified as a co-op site, they can value that link however they wish... Perhaps not count it at all. Thus, I think that making the links slightly more permanent... if even just for a few seconds would be of great benefit in keeping it from being so easy to identify co-op links... Those are just my thoughts... Regardless, I am happy to say that today was my 1 day anniversary of using the co-op and I already love it. Just looking to the future...
What about random link generators? Rotating ad space? RSS feeds might update in the seconds between spider refresh. a blogger might post a new blog just as the spider is refreshing. finding a link change when the page is refreshed and designating it a co-op link automatically would be a bad thing for a search engine.
I have a site that has rotating links, every time a page is visited i have four links that change, this site is not in the coop. soo... that is not an accurate way for them to detect the coop.
Plus, do you think Google is going to make such a drastic change (Reindexing in succesion is a big deal if multiplied by billions), just for what is really a relative small number of sites compared to those that use other techniques. Especially considering those using shady techniques aren't delivering relative SERPs while part of the Ad Networks approval process takes this into account!
Well, there is thinking and then deep thinking... After just thinking for awhile, I thought that my post about recrawling to detect co-op ads was right. After reading your responses and deep thinking... you guys are right... keep em rotating.
Well put. I totally agree with everything you say (kdobson99). I think the other way they can determine coop links is finding the file on your server (cmod 777) that contains the links. If we are to consider ways to make the program less obvious perhaps this is a consideration as well?