A thought just occured to me. Surely for a crawler to identify a co-op (or any other dynamically generated link) all it would have to do would be to load a page twice - and compare them. Does anyone know if this tactic is employed by any of the major SE's?
I just looked at Google News, and it said "auto generated 17 minutes ago". I refreshed it every minute for 5 minutes - each time the auto generated message rose by a minute. I compared the source of each version - the body remained exactly the same. Obviously the page's content changes when it is updated, but until then the same page is served to everyone. I'm not quite sure what you are referring to on CNN.com, but I don't use the site. On Co-op sites, the links change with each reload of the page. I'm pretty sure that it wouldn't be difficult for a search engine to identify 'rotated advert' type links with a reasonable degree of accuracy - i'm just interested in whether or not people believe that the major SE's reduce the 'strength' of these links as opposed to permanent ones.
I think what Shawn is trying to say is that there are *tons* of pages that don't have coop links that are different each time you refresh them. The fact that a page has different content with every refresh cannot positively identify it as having coop links.
I realise that, but what i'm driving at is not co-op links specifically, rather that 'type' of link - one that isn't permanent. I'm interested in whether SEs draw a distinction between 'static' links and 'rotated' links.
Apologies, it's 2am here, I wasn't really thinking! So is anyone aware of search engines treating rotated links any differently?