After a massive boost we've just dropped to where we were again....now i know roughly how many links / sites i need to get back to the better position i wonder if G would see static links as non co op or are we now filtered permanently as a co op linked site? definitely worth a test with a new site and a small amount of incremental weight each month to see if it triggers anything.... Cheers, Jonny Bravo
So, for some of us there is a common theme apparently/possibly related to a maybe aggressive use of the coop to both give and receive ads. My symptoms are the same as a number of others posting here - i.e gbot stops and pages are deindexed, PR remains, gbot comes back but sloooow (often blamed on duplicate content filters but in my opinion its not!) In my case this happened when I increased number of ads from 1 to 5. This of course added more ads to my site and simultaneously increased my weight adding more inbound links. Do we have sufficient information to propose a theory that under certain circumstances the coop network can be bad for your health? If yes can we somehow relate our experiences so that we can inform the community of what to avoid?
How many of the people posting in this thread have 301'd the non www of their site to the www? I didn't and I will do now in the next day or so...
I have been doing the 301 from non www to the www before getting rocked at the last update. I am with leeds1 on this - linking to a bad neighborhood is the most likely candidate.
Oliver, I've read this a few times - do you people really think that the non and www. could cause duplicate content issues? Everyone, I'm undecided about the DP coop - it's a great way to get links quickly, but I've always thought that we should get links which are themed on your sites topic, and not to get so many links in a short period of time. Could this be some sort of keyword sandbox depending on the KW term you are using? OR like Leeds1 said, linking to a bad neighborhood - this could quite easily done, and its something that needs to be resolved. The COOP is a great idea, but I think we need to take into consideration the area's that Google has seen to be tightening up on, duplicate content, bad neighbourhoods, and a big increase in links (and pages) which trigger some sort of sandbox (I think that has happened on my site, but it's nothing to do with the COOP - I had a large number of links and increase in pages in a short period of time!) Just some thoughts to think about... Darren
I doubt it, but I'm sure as hell going to find out... As a side note, another domain of mine has been hijacked (only just realised)... I'd check you guys too... http://www.davidnaylor.co.uk/archives/2004/12/11/hijack-quick-test/
I'm relatively sure it's simply aggressive growth in terms of pages and links. A sudden increase of links may only affect serps but combined with sudden growth in additional pages and outbound links this maybe an issue. As I see it it was a simple mistake to add 6 link slots (20k from DP and equivalent from another) combined with adding approx 300 pages worth of links and content within 15 days which is something that is hard to naturally generate for a site that only had 6 pages before. It's not sientific and is about as much as I'm prepared to investigate into the whimps of G. Expat
Starting to look like it, just lost the index page on msn local and the index page on msn.com has no cache
It's odd if it's something to do with tons of links otherwise we could all penalise our competitors.....surely ? -- I did not explicitly 301 redirect non www to www and I had different results in G for both under "site:xxx" - I now do this -- I dont think it's (for me) dup content as I come no-where with &filter -- I got in touch with G and they (apart from the usual) pointed me to a) hidden text which I have never done ever b) "dodgy redirect (which I had some cgi scripts in my amazon store and c) linking to bad neighbourhoods and d) effectively buying or selling links -- I had 4 sitewides coming into the site - they are now *GONE* Who knows I am still gone
I just joined the ad network and added the ads to my site and then started reading up in the forum for additional tips/information on building traffic into my site - and I discovered this thread..... I have a couple of thoughts on this issue.... First of all, couldn't the coop be turned into an "Ad Sense" type operation where ads are targetted based on keywords? I think this would really help the functionality of the coop, and I don't think it would be that difficult to do.... If we created a keywords list in our coop account and then ads were pulled based on those keywords or placed onto other sites based on those keywords then we would get more related PR which is what we really all need..... I think this would also reduce repeat content and eliminate bad neighborhood linking (unless you are hanging out in a bad neighborhood , though I'm not sure.... Thinking about the programming side of this I don't think it would be that difficult though it would make the ad server work a little harder.... The other thought/question I have is.... Do I have anything to worry about adding the coop to my site? My site has been around for several years but I have never targetted search engines. I recently rewrote the site and added a shopping cart and about 50-60 new pages of content (products) - I'm currently working on more content and links into the site. I only added one ad to the site so I have a fairly low weight, but I've already sent the coop referral link off to a friend with some sites that get more traffic and should kick some weight over to me.... So, do I have anything to worry about? (this is basically the only risky/non-targetted thing I've done for the site) Does anyone know? Thanks, Chad www.artthouglorious.com
This thread scared the bejeezus out of me so I started to some investigating and I noticed drastic differences in entry points from my logs. My customers were not coming in the same way. I checked my pages indexed in google and while my backlinks sure did increase in Google, I noticed a de-indexing/drastic drop in my product pages (about 3000) of them in the index. Don't know if it has anything to do with the co-op, but this seem to have started around the time of the last google update. While my homepage hasn't been affected yet, I can't take a chance and have since removed the ads there, sitewide in fact just in case. We'll see if the ranking for the product pages rise back, I hope they do because I showed up in the top 3 for each of them and it's demoralizing . . . par for the course I guess.
Has anyone here who is having troubles tried using the filter=0 on the end of a google search query? Just curious. http://www.google.com/search?q=query+here&filter=0
hey glengara maybe you were right but I doubt it what difference does it make if it effects seo guy or joe schmo from idaho seo guy is still nubmer 14 for seo, jeez I have several sites that nothing to do with the coop are showing no pages with site command my home page which has nothing to do with the coop just went from 14 to nowhere
I agree, we can quite easily blame the COOP network for what could simply be Google playing with our minds Google is going through some changes, these changes are affecting thousands of sites (if not millions!) and every SEO forum I visit everyone is talking about the same issues; 1. Dropping of pages in G 2. Loosing rankings in G 3. Penalised by G Maybe we should investigate what G has changed, rather than looking and blaming the COOP or any of our own SEO work.
Although I’m not using the co-op (had problems with the ASP version and my hosting service) I’ve experienced something similar. My 8 month old site (or its inbound links) is definitely sandboxed for my primary keyphrase. Alternate phrases are still progressing well in SERPs. I do however still get crawled normally. After much investigation, I’m convinced it is the result of to many links, to quick. If you looked at a graph of the total link count for my site, you’d see spikes in the number of BLs and would not see any points where links had dropped off significantly. I think it is safe to assume that this is not a normal link profile when comparing to the average website over time. Very consistently, I would move higher in SERPs for a couple of weeks. Then the link analysis program would come along, see a pattern it did not like and boom… I’d fall back a few pages. I think that each ‘penalty’ lasted about 30 days. During that period, I’d start coming back in SERPs and then get whacked again. I believe that GG is tracking the number of links per defined period, and if there is an unusual increase accompanied by an increase in OBLs (direct exchange or assumed three or four-ways) bang you’re nailed. If a site suddenly starts receiving a high number of links, and at the same time starts sending a high number of OBLs, it feels like a scheme. If the total link count does not exceed the site's highest number of links on record historically, I think it gets a pass. Adding lots of content quickly might make the site even more suspicious, but I don’t have any data on that. Basically, GG appears to be after link schemes and living by the adage: if it walks like a duck, and quacks like a duck, it's probably a duck. In this case, fried…. I've recently changed my approach to that of a slow steady increase in links, and sometimes waiting for drop-off before adding more. We'll see if it has any effect.
I agree that we cannot leap to the conclusion that it is the coop network (or more accurately our use of it) that is the cause of our particular woes. Many sites not involved in the coop network are taking hits and I certainly do not believe there is an "in principle" problem with coop. I am however prepared to believe that G has introduced an automated algo that can respond to website/link changes that can be induced in many ways one of which is using the coop in a particular way or for a particular site. PS The symptoms to which I am in particular referring are those where the gbot stops coming or slows right down and pages become deindexed. There is no point even discussing SERPS for pages that aren't indexed.
A couple of reads for you: Shift in Google Algorithm? December Google changes? Only 31 results shown for Yahoo New Google filter flaws search results This is in addition to prior reports of dynamic sites losing a lot of content: Google cutting fat from dynamic content? This may also be useful: Supplemental index Hope that helps.