Buying/Selling of Weight

While I have not sold any yet, I have been considering selling to clients that need to get listed higher - they have smallish sites, I will have spare weight, if I get their terms higher on the serps, I ought to be able to get paid for it just like I get paid for obtaining reciprocal links, and optimising their sites.

Their sites already have the ads on them, they just pay for a few more to get their SERPS up. They earn money from having higher SERPS, they pay some of that to me. Sounds fair to me.

If my SERP's are high enough, or I can get more $ selling my weight than getting higher on my SERP's, then why not sell the weight.

Spammy? - just keep control on the quality of the ads and who is to care what website earned them. The ad coop is definately for the benefit of the members of the co-op. The members bring in more pages from their and their clients sites, and advertise those sites. People will only pay for the weight if it is worth something to them, and if Google ranks the pages higher as a result of that purchased weight. People won't pay to get worthless pages to the top of Google.

I really don't know what the fuss is all about - and I have read this whole thread.

 

What about the quality of the sites, their content and the sites they link to?

What if a good ad links to a Russian drive-by download site, do you care about things like that being associated with the network or not?

 

Who is to say that any site is not able to join at the moment. It is ads that are checked. I don't care where my ads are shown, as long as they are able to be found by Google and that is what the co-op checks. The new categorisation facilities are certainly great, but at the end of the day (certainly at the moment), a link is a link. There will always be bad sites, but it is the average I am more concerned about, and there are an awful lot of good people around DP with great sites.

 

So in your opinion all is good as long as the ad looks good, where it takes the surfer matters not to you even if they are taken to a malware download site

 

It is up to Shawn to approve the ads, and he approves based on his published guidelines. Buying and selling weight would have the current method of approving ads kept the same.

If any of us found ads that were misleading, I am sure that Shawn would be quick to uphold the integrity of the co-op and disallow the ad.

Google works hard at not showing results that are not properly optimised for a term - text link on it own does not often rule over pages that have got all the different parts of the Google algo correct. I know there are exceptions like "Miserable failure", but in that case there has been a mountain of links.

Once the page ranks high for its term, people still need to see that it is relevant for its phrase based on the snippet, or ultimately find it relevant once they have clicked on it.

Why get high for a term if in the end people find it spammy and don't purchase/click on adsense for it?

 

Actually t2dman if I were you I would be careful with your clients as I guess they are restaurants - I certainly would be paying heed to what anthonycea and grevet have said.

Restaurants is something that I know quite a lot about, learnt by experience over a number of years, it so happens, and certainly, also, in Auckand NZ. I know your clients there as I know them here.

If I sold some weight to these clients and they had, when they looked, some ad pointing to a teenage chat room, selling of guns and knives or even promoting crap food, they would turn and point the finger at you.

I can picture it now... my old mate Pat Ngata standing over you at 25 stone threatening to beat the s... out you using his hells angels mates because he had a great restaurant promoting natural maori cooking and detesting Mcdonalds and a site promoting McDonalds appeared - I certainly would be laughing. I guess you wouldn't be.

 

I believe that would be the Mongrel Mob or Black Power, Foxy...not the Hells Angels

Good point though .

Cyclops.

 

Hi Foxy

I have no issue with the quality of the ads that are being shown through the co-op. Shawn does well. Have you seen instances of what you talk about?

The professionalism of a website is always important, and so whether to show links/ads or not is always an issue. When it is an issue, it would make sense for a client to buy a few co-op links from me to help get the site listed properly, and get some normal click throughs.

If having co-op links on a website is the only way for a website to stay at the top of the web for its search terms, or even to show at all (sandbox issues), then it is a small price to pay. Being part of the co-op is lots easier and cheaper (time and effort wise) than continually getting more recip links, although I keep on getting more links as well.

Google for the "Best Indian Restaurant", or "Best Indian Restaurants" - My clients site has been first without the co-op, but its a lot easier to stay there with a few co-op links (his own account). The links on the site are not too obvious or distracting on the website.

 

Actually yes, but because of the growth of the coop this has been rare, however this is the point.

Shawn, and only Shawn, approves and controls what is seen, and whilst the coop ads have largely remained within the sites of members of the coop this has not caused a major problem that we know about, however, the work load would increase dramatically if the "responsibility" was substantially shifted from self-regulation with over-approval, to sale of weight [read no control].

As the "weight" is legally owned by the members of the coop and distributed according to a formula, it is hardly correct that the members of the coop should agree to anything that would substantially increase the workload of the censor and also the possibility of mal-ads.

 

Can anyone confirm whether this is possible or not?

The only downside I can think of is that it takes up queries. I wouldn't mind if my API key is used a dozen times per day for this though.

 

Let people sell their weight. I wish I had enough to sell my own (lol). But seriously, I think it would take too much time to try and police that... as the coop would grow people would find a way to sell their weight anyhow. People always find a way to cheat the system if at all possible... human nature I guess.

Honestly, if I were you shawn I'd be thinking about how I can monetize. This is something that could highly benefit you. Think about making a gateway for people to easily buy and sell their weight through paypal... and the cost is an automatic 3% or 4% to DP for all transactions.

 

I voted without reading arguments for and against. I voted for allow it, but changed my mind to not allow it but you can't change your vote...

 

Shawn might be able to change it for you

 

All this buyin/sellin weight will get in the end at the point that someone will display the same ad twice on the same page, as being server from 2 different accounts... and that's not a good thing, but neither a bad thing

 

I'm glad to see that "no" is still in the lead

 

It isn't possible.

 

I think we fall into the same issue that Google and all other SE's have when it comes to selling.

Will there be people selling weight? Yes
Will it bring down the integrity of co-op? Not really I can't see that too much

This network is getting bigger and bigger by the moment, pretty soon we will need to two or three more servers running side by side in order to operate the network. You may think no that is not needed but believe me the bigger it gets the more features we'll have and the more processing power it will need.

Having said that I think we should allow people to sell their weight because in the end it will benefit the network as well.

Will I sell my weight? No! but that's because I'm using my weight for my own businesses. Would I sell my weight if I didn't have anything to promote? Yes.

My 2 cents

 

My situation is that. I have a realm of websites. One group are my core business sites, which weighed in nicely. I use this weight for these sites.

On the other hand I have another group of sites that I constucted in my early days of webmastering, for fun. They were built in 1999/2000. They weighed in even better. For these sites I would sell weight to benefit my business sites.

What about the concept of trading my weight for quality bl's?

 

I think selling weight is fine, but it has to be done transparently.

I think a system whereby Shawn gets a commission of all the sales is the only fare thing, after all the network is free. If you profit directly from it, so should he.

I know it’s a lot of work, but a weight auction system where he gets 5% commission or something like that it the only fair thing I see.

 

I was just wondering though if that vote is accurately repersented

if peoples vote is based on their weight , which it should be

then perhaps its totally off

like if there are 3 people with a combined weight of over a million vote that they want to sell weight

should 4 people with a combined weight of like 2000 be able to tell them they can't?