Buying/Selling of Weight

People will only go underground? And then what about buying links from websites just to improve weight....?

 

Well since I'm not much a community builder I have the charisma of of rock

so to me just paying for weight seems to be my only alternative, or weight till some of the xml feed sites I just built get spidered in

I don't think it matters if people sell weight, I think the only thing that would bring down the quality of the network would be ads for lower quality sites

 

It may seem a bit spammy, but as long as there is a method of checks and balances involved that require validation of ads, I don't see the harm in it. The only true harm is when you begin linking to "bad neighborhoods", but as long as the validation system that's in place invalidates a site that isn't listed in google, I don't really see any major harm.

 

Absolutely. Since the coop is free, it should remain free. I'd never think of selling my weight. It's mine, I tell you! Mine!

Well, I'm afraid since I'm so anal this would bug me to no end, if I didn't know what my weight was. For the public number, ie there are 4,679 sites in the coop and if you divide this and subtract that and do this to figure out the exact weight; that wouldn't bother me to be dumbed down.

As well; I personally don't feel it's anyones business what another member has unless they wanna say.

 

Shawn asks:

Does buying and selling weight degrade the network? as a newcomer to the coop, i'll offer these observations:
a) so long as the GYM (google-yahoo-msn) algo's aren't modified to trip a wire the concept of inbound hyperlinks is sound;
b) if weight aggregators (buyers of weight) tended towards spammy / borderline, their increased weight would increase the presence of lower-end adverts;
c) we've only been in the coop for a week or two; however we've been DP afficianados for more than a year. The explosiveness of the coop is apparent. In the beginning, we started serving coop member ads and were 'appalled' by the quality of the ads on our properties. In the last 10 days, we've seen capitalisation initiatives/ categorization initiatives, and we probably missed a lot of happenings. We have *yet to see* success-story results - and we came in with mature 1-4 year old sites with solid page ranks and content; our weight is in the 50K+ level. The point? As long as the coop strives to a copy standard, we do not see degradation from our point of view, only improvement.

Shawn also asks if adopting some other indicator might be in order.

We'd suggest that resources continue to be focused on upgrading the ad content incoming and outgoing. Any economic indicator is tradable, if it's not pagerank, its weight, or links or whatever.

 

I think that having a dumbed down weight number is a good idea, but it might require changing the algo a bit since currently the cat is out of the bag, or at least we think it is.

I'm one of the first few sellers of weight, as far as I know, but it seems that people are seeing it as an income opportunity now. The problem I see with that is people building spammy sites to get more weight to make more money. The more spammy sites in the network, the lower the overall value that it provides - and the more vulnerable we all are to the network as a whole being targeted as a "link farm" by the big SE's. It also dilutes the value that the quality members bring about, and dilutes their ad presentation within the network.

I had mentioned a community standard type of ranking in the coop network forum for published ads a day or two ago. Maybe we need a similar system for co-op membership (although this might present its own set of problems).

 

Being probably one of the very smallest fry in the network I would consider buying weight but don't yet know its *true* price/value and am concerned as to any shifts in SE algos that might result in me paying for "commodities" that may lose their value overnight and leave me out of pocket. It is a potential risk and a gamble that currently seems to favour the "weighty" for now...

As such I am currently focusing on that (IMHO) most important commodity of trying to boost my weight with original content and it's going so very slowly. I am still to be convinced of weight benefits (being "small" and having seen them rise, fall to zero, rise again and fall to nearly zero) so am still in the middle of this situation and will continue to watch the quality vs. quantity issues here...

 

I havent really been in this long enough to realize what good the weight is to begin with. So far, in roughly 4 days of running this, I have dropped 1 backlink in google, dropped 75 backlinks in the beta.msn search, and one of my keyword phrases that were ranked 50, is not not even on the radar.

But I have a weight of over 30,000.

As far as buying and selling the weight though, something just doesnt seem right about it, especially for a co-op, that is being provided for free.

I think you will find that most of the middle of the pack people would prefer to not see weight being sold, and on the other side, people with low content sites and extra money, along with people with very popular sites that really dont need the weight to begin with, will favor the buying and selling of weight. It all boils down to what you, as the designer of the program, want to see this become.

 

Well as someone said earlier in the thread, if they notice a dramatic drop due to a "dumbed down" scale of their weight, they would know why. I'm sure you would notify us of anything such as this and still even then those with the higher "dumbed down" weight would know that they have more weight than that.
I for one have extra weight. I've determined that with the weight i'm using for my targetted key-phrase is enough to get me #1 in Yahoo and MSN & found a small little economic opportunity for my extra weight.
I do agree about one thing, that the selling of weight may bring in a lot of spammy websites, but there might be a counter measure against this, maybe if it was put up in the past 1, 2, 3, 4 months it wouldn't receive any weight or it would only receive a fraction of what a site that is 6, 7 or 8+ months old would receive, before the network was up and running like it is. How to determine that? Beats me... but i'm pretty sure it take a few months before a spammy website can get enough pages indexed to have any significant weight. Or maybe PR can play a factor in this. If the website has a PR of 0 then that tells us something right there.
Well I really don't know, but as someone said "It's my weight" and I would think "I" would be able to do what I want with it. The only reason why I rented some of my weight out was because it was "OK'd" by Shawn, but I guess he's not liking it.... We'll see what happens.

 

Of course people who already sold their weight should not be penalized

(btw, I donated my money + a little to the server fund)

Maybe limit the amount of weight that can be sold, or the number of sellers... or maybe this is just a natural evolution of a tool that was a little unexpected. I would certainly favor a system that Shawn could profit from - meaning if you sold your weight, you had to give him a commission or maybe it's OK as long as you have donated 250 to the server fund.

You know what, donating 250 to the server fund as a requirement is a good idea. The more people sell, the bigger this gets, the more it evolves, the more we need new servers. Also - there should be a Donate money to Shawn fund, because although I'm sure he makes money off of his other stuff, there has to be incentive to do the kinds of things he's been doing lately. If the co-op network got back-burnered, we might all have a little bit of trouble on our hands. At least if he had a couple grand donated, he'd be able to outsource some bug fixes in the future if he was strapped with other more profitable projects.

 

I agree.

I think selling weight encourages low quality sites. It doesn't take but a couple good links to get a decent PR and there are plenty of programs that will spit out "Thousands" of pages.

But hey, that's just me.

 

My thoughts are that the network will see a decent amount of spammy sites regardless of whether selling is allowed. Even if you could somehow ban all selling of Coop weight by anyone, you are still going to see spammy sites from people wanting to promote their own sites. I'm sure permitting weight transactions does increase this, but I'm not sure how much effect it would have, and in the end it's not really the root of the problem.

I was one of the early buyers of weight and I don't see a huge problem with it. However, I did receive a private message from someone offering to set up a site with 10,000 pages to use in the network. That idea really bothers me. I didn't even bother to look into it, but I'm sure it would not be considered a quality site. But like I said before, I think that this is going to go on quite a bit - regardless of if selling of weight is permitted.

So, to answer Shawn's questions: 1) I think that buying/selling of weight is not a huge factor in the overall quality of the network (am I wrong that there's only been about 4-5 transactions on this board?). 2) The dumbed-down number will help some I think.

 

I agree. You get a profit from this, you should give some back. Maybe instead of a fixed amount it could be some %.

 

Google makes it very clear do not buy or sell links. It dosen't matter if you sell the links yourself, or allow someone else (coop network) to sell the links for you.

Monetary exchanges in the coop network need to stop. Even if it can't all be stopped, DP needs to atleast make an effort to keep Google from frowning upon what we're doing.

 

Where does google say this? buying/sellings links is the very nature of advertising online. I buy advertising links everywhere on the internet and it only helps traffic and rankings.

 

I just got an generic email from Google yesterday RE a question I sent them about my site. It says:

 

I hate to say it, but I agree. As of now, since the co-op is relatively new and free for all, I can't help but feel/fear that we are literally a keystroke away from seeing any benefits eclipsed by a drooling proactive Google employee looking for a reason to shut it down. This could be the excuse they've been looking for -- giving us all really something to sing about. The last thing we need to do is make waves and have them poking around for ways of targetting the network. Given a long enough time, they will find a way and this may soon be a "too good to be true" opportunity.

Buying and selling weight (Ad placement) seems to conflict more with with their programs then a free program across the board.

 

Will Google be shutting down JupiterWeb/internet.com too? They sell links even more explicitly than the Coop does.

"such as buying or selling links to increase a site's PageRank value"

No one is buying Coop links to increase PR (or atleast I hope not).