I wonder if there is a lag w/ Yahoo that they aren't dropping your links yet. How long since you've had your own weight pointed to your own site? I hope someone isn't trying to get you banned by pointing thier links to you. Kierslee
Not to worry, I'm already banned. lol I had a lot of weight pointing to my site for 2-3 months and my site got up to 1.5 million links. I've been banned now for about 15 days (ever since the Charlie update) but I've had the co-op pointing away from my site for about 5 days now and my link total went up to 1.6 million. geesh. That's how powerful the co-op is. Just the essence of the co-op will get you links. hahaha.
I am convinced that the recent MSN update has included a way of tracking artificial link building. I am sure your co-op weight can get a site banned from both Yahoo and MSN>
I'm not sure how you can be so convinced when there still are lots of coop sites ranking in yahoo and msn
Great experiment! Finally someone with the power and balls to publicly test the theory we are all interested in, kudoos my friend! As for the increase in BL for your own site, I think I remember it takes about 72hrs before it all proprogates to everybody's site in the co-op. At the minumum. I got out of the co-op a few months ago and still I get the occasional link somehow. Also it takes 24-48hrs before Yahoo is showing the cached page/links. Therefore it is only natural that the amount of links to your own site increases at least the first 5 days after you pulled them. With the same logic it takes at least 5 days before the full strength links are going to your competitor in this experience. Give it another week or maybe 2 and we know the results of this beautifull experiment everybody is interested in, even the ones who complain it is unethical, otherwise they wouldn't be reading and posting....
I am also interested in this experiment.. Not for use against people but for information on why sites like ours did poorly. Looking forward to hear your findings. As far as artificial link building in msn, I can say that they have no such filter... They love quantity and anchor text. My co-op sites are doing great at msn.
What I was seeing was drops for many keywords that I had a site ranking for. The only thing I had done before the drops was join the co-op. What else could cause this drop. I had one term go from #1 to #105. Go ahead, give me bad rep. I am just trying to solve a drop in MSN and don't have many things to look at as reasons for it.
OK, I still think that some how Yahoo is penalizing sites with lots of co-op weight. However I am no longer supporting the original idea of mine that MSN also penalizes sites with lots of co-op weight. I have recently seen some nice improvements in my rankings in MSN, just but doing a little on page and internal link SEO. So I have a different spammer I would like to try to knock out of Yahoo for those who took me up on the original experiment offer.
Ok here is the update on my little experiment. The site I was targeting was ranked #8 on Yahoo on 6/30/2005 The term returns 22 million results. 6/30/2005 Link: 39600 Linkdomain: 42600 no ranking change 7/1/2005 Link: 41600 Linkdomain: 44700 no ranking change 7/2/2005 Link: 122,000 Linkdomain: 62500 no ranking change 7/3/2005 Link: 122,000 Linkdomain: 67200 no ranking change 7/4/2005 Link: 140,000 Linkdomain: 76100 no ranking change 7/5/2005 Link: 140,000 Linkdomain: 77400 no ranking change 7/6/2005 (I was on vacation, sorry) 7/7/2005 Link: 135,000 Linkdomain: 68100 no ranking change 7/8/2005 Link: 272,000 Linkdomain: 92100 no ranking change As you can see there was a small dip yesterday then a huge jump today. Yet their ranking hasn't budged. In fact none of the top 10 have moved at all since the update. Now here is the interesting part. The anchor text I was using was a different term altogether than the main one that I was checking their rankings on. This is because the experiment was to get them banned in Yahoo by massive links, not to see if I could move them up in the rankings. I certainly didn't want to help them too much in Google or MSN. The term I used as anchor text was somewhat related to their site but they did NOT rank in the first 600 results on Google, MSN, or Yahoo in that term. They don't have the term in their URL, Title, Meta Keywords, or anywhere in their body text. Now, after a week they are #1 in Google, MSN, and Yahoo for the anchor text I was using. They even outrank sites that have the term in their domain and title. And it isn't a small term either, it returns 4 million in Yahoo. Ever heard of Google Bombing? Well, I think I just Search Engine bombed all 3 engines using the co-op. I sent a site from NOT RANKED to #1 on all 3 engines, in a fairly competitve term, in 1 week. Now SPDUDE brought up a very interesting point today with an experiment he was doing. http://forums.digitalpoint.com/showpost.php?p=231053&postcount=34 I don't know if my competitor will eventually get banned when Yahoo updates again, but it appears that Yahoo may have just done some "summer cleaning" and banned a bunch of sites one time. To be honest, it reminds me of Google's Florida update two years ago that was also done during the summer. It is a way for them to clean house before the major holiday season. Maybe they will ban again but then again it could be 6 months to a year from now. For those sites left standing, it seems that the co-op can work just like it worked prior to Yahoo's Charlie update. I'll keep testing and we'll see. It has only been a week but I've taken their links from 39k to 272k and they haven't even gone down (or up) a single spot.
Thanks for the update. I know many people say that Y! SERPs change frequently, but that has not been my experience at all. For the two sites I follow closely, it seems the only time they change position is with an algo tweak. For these sites, I can be pretty sure that they'll maintain position for 2 or 3 months at a clip. So, it may be that you'll have to wait that long to really see if it works. /*tom*/
hi all, interesting discussion here, and i just wanted to add my experience with a site that i did some very aggressive seo recently. in the course of 3 months i added a couple hundred links from directory sites and others, and many site-wide links from sites with a total of about 70,000 pages, and enjoyed a #2 ranking on Yahoo for a term with 35,000,000 results before Yahoo banned me. I also confirmed the ban with the Yahoo search team and they claimed that they would reindex me in the future, however, it never happened. i also noticed that Yahoo never lowered my link count despite the links having disappeared many weeks ago, and MSN never seemed bothered by any of it, although they did do a massive devaluation of site-wide links about a month ago. Google just kept me in the 'sandbox'. so i think you probably can get a competitor banned on Yahoo if you tried hard enough, however, i would also say that i would be rather concerned about the ethical and legal ramifications of doing so. good luck to all and be wary of too rapid link-building
I agree with LongCall - the sites I follow in Yahoo tend to stay put and really only move when there's an algorithm tweak of some sort. As for getting someone banned - would it really be worth the time and effort to do so? It would only be one of many sites that 'might' disappear and while there certainly would be harm done to the competitor, it would necessarily help your own situation... it just doesn't sound like a smart idea (not to mention the nasty karma that would go along with it).
That was my experience. Yahoo Rankings increased very well - for about 7 weeks, until they did some update and then they dropped the site entirely-- not slowly, but all in one day. Many other posts showed similar results within a few days of each other. If the experiement works, I believe there will be a complete removal at the same time with no slight decrease in rankings. Yahoo hasn't sent a single vistor to the site since this day, even though they spider the site daily and show a few hundred pages in KW tracker. It isn't a large site, but gets about 500 uniques a day.
I agree TopSpin. My plan isn't really to start going down a list of competitors and trying to get them all banned. I'm mostly trying to prove that you CAN get a competitor banned. I just dont see how they can ban you for someone else linking to you. OK, granted, we control these links in the coop. Meaning we have all proactively gone out and acquired these links and therefore we are in violation of their Guidelines but Yahoo doesn't know that. How can they distinguish between a company that TRIED to get these links and another company who got these links unknowingly (link in my experiment)? I know I may not have a major effect put I'm going to try to prove the flaw in their algorithm; that this can actually be used maliciously. They can't assume that just because someone got a lot of links very quickly, they are a spammer. You can't control who links to you. Maybe these links SHOULD be worthless. Maybe they can devalue the links like Google does, but outright banning companies seems like a drastic approach that will also produce a lot of false positives. I don't think I can go to Yahoo with a theory that this can be done. I need to actually do it and then tell them I've done it, thereby proving to them that their logic is flawed. If I have to get the national media involved, so be it. I guess we are finding that it could take months before I know for sure. I'm just waiting for their next update.
CoopGuy - This is really a big benefit to the search engines... by running the 'test' and then showing them the results, you are giving them EXTREMELY valuable data on their systems. Maybe they should hire you?? Logic dictates that a ban because of a site 'variable' that isn't totally in the hands of the site owner would simply be wrong. I agree... a ban is just too much.