There was a discussion about google detecting AN, and possibly penalizing participants (for whatever reason known to them): http://forums.digitalpoint.com/showthread.php?t=1630 Shawn's answer was that the network is hard to detect. But why can't google participate in the network via a few sites of their own, float some strange looking achor text, and whenever it is detected, penalize the site showing it. I have not started participating, but being on the conservative side, just checking things out first, and I never know what google thinks of things.
And who knows what google will discount for SERP purposes. One should not solely base their entire SERP placements on the coop - always diversify. Even though with its success, you might be tempted to do so.
That's a good plan, if they wanted to find out who is participating. What about when someone starts another coop ad network, but keeps it more "under the radar?" they just keep specifically penalizing? But what if we all started participating in some program that doesn't violate Google's TOS (like the AN) and Google says it's wrong and penalizes that group. That seems a little harsh. Wouldn't Google at least give warning? OK if it's against TOS, they don't have to warn ... agreeing to the TOS is the warning. But the AN doesn't violate the TOS. just my 2 cents. again.
I got pm'ed by someone offering space in their ad network once the idea is out its not progmatically that difficult to duplicate kind of like napster remeber napster then morpheus kazaa win mx edonkey .........
Personally, I think the whole "penalization" threads are old and tired. Are people forgetting this is a co-op ad network, not a co-op link network? Text based ads (AdWords) within www.google.com (and every other major website in the world) do it the exact same way (no JavaScript and no IFRAME). I would suspect a major reason that AdSense is served via JavaScript is because it's easier to setup for end-users. If users within the co-op ad network decide to individually turn it into a link network by hiding links or making the text so small it's not useable to the end-user, then I hope Google *does* ban their site for spam. And if anyone reports any ad network site doing it, I will ban their site from the ad network myself. Here's some reading for people... http://www.digitalpoint.com/tools/ad-network/history.html
I read the history.html link in Shawn's post above and I agree. You've done what you went out to accomplish, and you've done a great job doing it. Advertisers are happy, the coder is happy, and the search engines seem happy. Nicely done.
If google starts punishing participants then we could all turn around and point our links toward our competitors. heh heh heh (need devil icon here). They aren't going to do that and I doubt they really care much at all. Participants mostly put accurate anchor text on their links. All g cares about is that the sites they show are relevent to the keyword. When we advertise on this network, it ends up helping google achieve that goal.
Thanks everyone. I am glad that you see Ad Network as a positive thing. Just wanted to be a bit more sure before joining.