Can you BAN a competitor?

This is an amazingly long thread that serves only to demonstrate what everyone knew all along: unnatural linking patterns are penalized. That in no way suggests that '" coop is a weapon that can be used to ban competitors." That experiment was tried, and of course didn't work. Anyone perpetuating that myth is misreading the experiences presented here. No established site was negatively impacted - in fact (as everyone knows) the SE's interpreted the anchor text and started ranking the site for that phrase. Just like everyone already knew. A brand new site instantly achieving mass links got droppped - not banned, it was still in the index just didn't rank for anything. Nothing new there. Sounds more like algorithms working just like they should - detected unnatural links that were not in fact "votes" and discounted them. What's the problem?

 

I really do not think "un-natural linking patterns are to blame. The idea behind the Coop is to provide "Advertising Space" for free to others in return for the same. The "linking" is nothing more than a happy coincedence IMHO.

I think that Yahoo has specifically targeted the Coop itself, along with other factors that tie into their natural ranking of a sites importance or lack there of.

I have sites that have NO COOP WEIGHT at all pointed at them, but display coop ad banners on them that have also been dropped. So it is not just about pointing weight/links to a site, but the outgoing links themselves that are at risk in Yahoo/SBC land.

Has anyone (CoopGuy) looked at sites that have NO COOP WEIGHT at all? But DO have Coop ads on them? I think that would be an interesting test as well. Take a simlilarly ranked/indexed "new" site and just load up Coop ads on the site. Do not point any weight to it. Just the outbound coop links. Watch how fast it goes poof.

It's really disappointing that this is happening because the Coop works IMHO. Aside from the fact that the ads that show up are not targeted to content that is simliar on the sites they are listed on, I have seen people coming to my sites from Coop ads. In fact I have noticed a few sites that showed up in the top 10 referrers on one of my sites. Imagine my amazement when I found it was a site that displayed my ads.

The Coop works. Yahoo is missing the mark here targeting it like this.

Anyway, my 2 cents again.

 

Your site banned from yahoo?

I have tried a test on a new site where I am doing linking at an extremely hyper slow pace....

So far it has showed up in all three serps, where other sites I have tried more aggressive linking have an extremely hard time showing up in Yahoo and Google. It is not in a terribly competitive field though, so the jury is still out... But I am going to track it over a period of time and see what happens.

 

"Linking is nothing more than a happy coincidence"

I would, without trying to be an ass, suggest you count the references to link weight, pointing coop weight in this thread. That is, I think, exactly what is being discussed. Are you suggesting that the "I can take down a competitor with Coop links" has nothing to do with link weight in the algo's?

Either way you cut it, the Coop is gaming the algo. I am not - in any way - making a moral judgement about that. But a person would have a hard time arguing that when linkage became a ranking variable something like the Coop was what they had in mind. That's gaming the SE's. Go for it you want. I am not passing judgement. But the only thing this this thread "proves" is that that is not a strategy viable long term. So don't base a business model on it. And don't complain if you choose to pursue it and it backfires - that's a lot of eggs in a flimsy basket and no amount of griping and foot stomping offsets the fact that the such approaches are a short-cut to start with. Given the genesis of the link paradigm it's hard to argue that something like the coop isn't gathering pennies instead of digging for the dollar bill. Good links outweigh less good and that's never been a secret. But don't complain and act like anybody owes you anything because you made the choice to take the short cut. Again, I am not making some high-brow moral judgement. I don't wear a hat. But I also acknowledge the inherent problem with quick schemes.

The only evidence offered thus far is that a new site suffers from a massive influx of links and established sites benefit. That's been interpreted to mean that someone might assinate a competitor. That's not true at all. It depends what "competitor" means. Basically a competitor isn't competition until they're an established site. Being able to knock off a brand new domain doesn't mean anything - except that Y reasonably views 10,000 links to a three day old domain as suspicious. And they should; that's unnatural linking and flies in the face of the whole idea behind giving any weight to links at all. Was it really the expectation that SE's would not ever catch on?

 

Though this is a nice thought and would certainly be the position I'd take if questioned by a search engine. I would venture to say that 99.99% of the members in the co-op are NOT in it for "advertising". I've had more links than most people in the coop and none of the coop sites that have had my links on them have made the top 500 referring domains.

The co-op is about one thing. Link popularity. One could even argue that being delisted in Yahoo is worth the possitive impact seen on MSN and GOOGLE.

Yahoo is walking a fine line here and may have ventured too far to one side of it. Of COURSE I can understand their need to combat link spam. It also makes sense in most cases that an unnatural growth of links in a short period of time would set off a red flag and could be a site that is trying to manipulate their rankings. My tests were not done on 3 day old sites. All were 6 months to 1 year old and had hundreds of pages and links before I ever pointed the co-op to them. All were already ranking in Yahoo at the time. But having 200 links over 6 months was no big deal and the sites were doing fine. They weren't ranked #1 but they were in the top 20 in their terms. It wasn't until the links jumped by thousands (or in some cases hundreds of thousands) in a matter of weeks, did they disappear.

I don't think Yahoo makes a distinction between a "great site with great content" and an outright black-hat-riddled link farm as long as both sites were trying to manipulate their results in one form or another.

There may be a difference between being banned and delisted, but there probably are not degrees of severity in being delisted. So, if you violated 5 of the guidlines, I don't think you receive a worse penalty than violating 1.

The other side of the fine line that Yahoo is treading is of course false positives. Sites that might see legitimately fast growth rates in links. Take a site about a natural disaster, or an Olympic website, or a site for a major upcomming movie. These sites are launched quickly due to the nature of the event and receive a skewed amount of traffic and attention in a very short period of time.

The more I research this topic, I find that it may not just be the massive number of links alone (though I think that is a huge part of it). Keep in mind that it is equally unnatural to have those links disappear a day from now, or even 10 seconds from now when the page is reloaded. It really is not hard for them to detect these rotating links.

But here is the problem I have with their resolution to the link spam problem. One of the fundemental characteristics of the Internet is that you can't control who links to you. If getting massive links is frowned upon then why not simply devalue the links and make them worthless. The site would fall in ranking to where they believe the site should naturally be ranked according to their formula. I think the delisting of sites is a kneejerk reaction that has caused more harm than good.

At the end of the day, they simply might not even care. In the big picture, really only a small fraction of sites were really effected. Of course the number seems much larger when it is talked about on SEO message boards. I wonder why...haha In particular Digital Point Co-op members seem to have been hit hard. Is this really any surprise knowing how the co-op works?

I am more concerned about Yahoo's search philosophy than my site's rankings. I just don't see this approach heading down the right path. It seems more like a band-aid than a really solution. I am now more interested to see how close to the line you can get without going over it. Is it 30 new links a day or 150 or 1000? I don't know. Maybe there is a sliding scale based on other factors such as age of a site, relevancy and logevity of the links, etc. I don't have answers for any of these questions but I do think that a lot more testing is needed.

 

I still would like to know if throwing 80,000 points of co-op weight at an established site would have the same effect as it would doing it to a new site.

 

I have 2 sites with co-op ads (displaying only) with competitive kewords ranked #1 in Yahoo.

 

Of course. None of my sites WITH co-op ads were penalized. It was the sites that had the weight POINTED to it. Displaying co-op ads is not the problem (though I think it could be a problem in the future). It is GETTING links by using the co-op weight.

Basically what I was doing is using my 400+ websites in the co-op to point all of the weight to only a few. It was those few that got delisted even though they actually didn't have co-op ads themselves. This isn't about the ads, it is about the links.

 

A friend of mine got hired before to get a page off of Google's #1 spot for a certain phrase. That page was badmouthing the service of the company that hired him. He basically created a lot of pages of his own and got them ranked on top instead. I think it's possible to get a competitor banned also, but it would be very costly.

 

Yeah, but did that really get them banned, or did it just push them down further in the rankings? Either way, the cost would be minimal. It's only time, and as you said, they hired someone to do it?

 

i have couple sites with a good amount of coop weight surviving in yahoo

but i also have a bunch that are gone