Can Google punish my site for using the co-op ad network?

If you are using just co-op ads then should be fine.

Google has a problem if you use other "Contextual ad" ALONG with adsense.

~G

 

He's not on about adsense - he's talking about getting banned from googles natural search results for using the COOP.

To answer the guys actual question:

No, I don't believe there is an official statement from Matt specifically about the COOP.

The most official info I have so far found would be this http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/indexing-timeline/ - Scroll down until you find the section on "Reading current feedback" - no specific mention of the COOP here, but a very clear warning against non relevant, spammy footer links. What you take from that is up to you.

 

Google can ban your site for whatever reason it wants...Coop has only benefited my sites. I never tried to be greedy and get a million backlinks in a week with the coop either though.

 

Thats a rather stupid statment to be honest. Of course they can ban you for whatever reason they want - but they are not going to are they - They are only going to ban a website that is deemed to be damaging their business model.

Google very rarely bans websites - Its more a case of negative marks against a website which are taken into account in their alogrithm

 

Seems pretty interesting ideas. Why do Google wants to ban your site by adding some more links to your OWN site? You don't spam keywords or anything...

 

Googles alogrithm works on links - so if googles alogrithm works on links then its pretty obviously that either adding mass links out or in is going to affect the alogrithm. Google doesn't want its results artificially manipulated (by artificial link building ) - therefore it doesn't take the brains of a rocket scientist to conclude that if you are manipulating links either in or out your site in an attempt to change your google ranking you can expect to get stung for doing so.

I find it hard to believe people still struggle with this very basic concept - even after google has explicitely told you so.

 

Wow, i havent been on here for 2 days short of 3 years from my login information!

Ill give some updates on coop and how its worked for me...

Nothing short of fantastic! Never had any sites that have been penalised, made some nice money promoting various (many) sites with it too.

One thing i would say that people keep missing the point of:

"In NO WAY can google punish a site that is being linked TO by a member of the coop network."

If this was the case then we could all put our competition out of business.

Just keep doing what you should be doing; adding content, gaining other links, adding tools, writing blogs, wroting external articles for other sites, creating/using rss feeds etc.

Do the above and push the coop network to your site and you will have many happy, profitable times indeed.

Too many worry about the coop and blame it for other things that they are not doing correctly. Its easy to blame 'something'. STOP doing this and start working on your own site, making it as best as you can...

 

it is illegal to use bidvertise with google adsense ? please tell me.

 

That is really true and if i were you i would listen him.

 

I have been in the COOP for a couple of years as well, maybe even three, I can't remember.
Problems with Google ... none that I can pin down to the COOP.

However the power of the COOP only became really apparent to me recently.
I have a PR3 site thats a couple of years old and it was going nowhere, it has about 30 backlinks from pretty ordinarly sites, so I decided to change the focus and changed the meta tags to another niche.
I then pointed 20k COOP weight to the site split up between three different terms relating to that niche.

Within two weeks the site was #1 for the keywords I was targeting. Ok their were only around 500k results for those terms but still hitting #1 so fast I think proves that the COOP does work. This raises an interesting thought, perhaps we raise the bar too high with the terms we target using the weight.

Anyway thats not the end of the story, another week on and I found three of my other sites on the first page for those same terms. None have the terms or keywords on the sites.
All I have is one link from the site I am pointing the weight to, to those sites and the anchor text is totally different.

So yes the COOP works and works very well.

 

But as Fryman says ..............

Personally I believe it can do both good and bad - I've very good proof of both. I also think you would be foolish to believe that anything that can send your rating from 0 to No1 at the flick of a switch is not going to get hunted down by google in the end.