I have seen a significant drop in my ranking for a lot of terms as well. I was on the first page for a very signifant phrase for my site and now i am not even on the map. This diminishing of rank seems to have happened within the past 2-3 weeks. DP, Is it possible in any way that the new code upgrade could be affecting this in any way? I have looked at the source of the html it produced and do not see anything wrong, but you would know better. I have also tested the app as if my user agent was google's and it does not show the image tags. Guess my main concern is that they may be detrimenting sites that use these methods to inflate their rankings.
Why does that bum you out? The referenced thread is speculation about the future: see the second post in the thread, posted by yfs1. Then see mine on page 5. There are others in that thread that caution people not to panic but that's what this is about: panicking in the face of hysteria generated by speculation about what may or may not happen sometime in the future. Google has a lot of patents and a lot of ideas kicking around in the lab that will never be implemented.
well your right minstrel, but i do think any se will want to discount link churned links. so even if they haven't discredited these links, and i do believe google already has, they will in the future. i doubt se's are going to be ok with any system that warps serps so easily. call it a hunch. different outbound links everytime googlebot hits your page isn't hard to detect. if i was google, i'd discount them too. now ... keep the links static for a month maybe 2 and any engine will have major issues trying to detect that.
But as Shawn and others have already observed, this is also true for AdSense and other affiliate programs like Amazon and indeed any rotating banner system. Why would they be discounted? I just don't get why people are so worried about this but I guess my advice is if it worries you, remove the ads. You can be sure that if I see convincing and incontrovertible evidence that the ads were damaging rankings for my site they'd be gone in a flash -- I just don't see any evidence that it's happening now and I don't see it happening any time soon.
oh, i hear that minstrel. i swore in another thread to drop it and really .... i have. but the argument from my perspective (and others) is that as a strict ad network it's just not so attractive to me anymore. i know everyone says it's an "ad" network, but that isn't what got thousands of subscribers ... IBLs and it's affect serps is what built it. so while this luxury car did 0-60 in 3.5 seconds ... and oh yeah, it also had a comfortable ride too ... now that it does 0-60 in 15 seconds ... I'm not so sure i'm buying.
adsense is a bad example ... it's not spiderable content ... it's dynamic JS. amazon is depending on how you build it ... my amazon endeavors are mostly static.
I'm not so sure about that... seems to me Googlebot version 2 has been touted as having the ability to follow JS links... My Amazon links are dynamic... can't see getting penalized for those either.
I personally think that, although laudable in theory, shawn wasted his time coding the stats part. I am a big coop fan, but I think the stats are a waste of time and server resources and will go virtually unused by users. I dont know if the img tag is something to be concerned about or not, but its an unecessary risk since it could bring the coop down in theory and gives us very little in return. I would say the time and server resources would be better spent making links more relevent, removing the cap so the coop is fair to larger sites, maybe incorporating yahoo's pages indexed into things somehow to offer more stability and making a stronger system overall. This is not to say I dislike the coop in any way. Just think the stats was an idea that looked good on paper...but not in practive. Just my .02
1. he probably did it for the challenge 2. I don't know why you assume users aren't paying attention to it -- check out the Coop threads -- seems a number of people are. It also helped me discover that there was a problem with the way I'd set up my accounts, which without the stats may have gone undetected for quite a while. But the conclusion that it "gives us very little in return" is based on the assumption that people don't look at or care about the stats -- if the assumption is false, so is the conclusion. I'd disagree with that - really large sites don't need the Coop as much and without all the smaller sites, who would be discouraged from joining if the Coop followed your suggestion, the large sites wouldn't get as many impressions, no?