That's very true. You should always weigh the pros and cons. I find that there are the cons (unfortunately they change too much to be predictable, hence the ongoing discussions here, and the frustrations of those who have to keep reading the 'what ifs'.) - *but* the pros are persistent enough to make it worth while, and the cons I refer to are local, nothing to do with the engines, G or otherwise. Here's an example - the coop is all about rotating links. Rotating links are not by any stretch as good as persistent ones, but they are definitely worth having. Take the recent MSN beta rollout to production. It's one major flaw is the importance it places on links - both persistent and rotating. In simple terms, if you have the weight, you have the rank. So for a little unpredictability, and a fair chunk of weight, you have MSN in the bag.. for me, this meant thousands of extra visitors overnight. The thing to remember is engines don't apply rules to just one or two sites. If any penalties were in play, it would be evident coop wide - and materialize here quickly ! Lets not forget the coop is only a small part of your typical campaign as well. It's great to get you off the ground, but recips will always be the mainstay IMHO. Cheers, JL
You can find them here : http://www.jupitermedia.com/partners/ Just visit internet.com and take a look on the lower left hand side to see the format of partner links. They have a revenue sharing program if you have a decent proposal. If you need an example of a powerful text link advertising network, that's the place to look. Cheers, JL
Another thing to remember about Google is that they insist on doing everything by algorithm. Now, a human could come to this site, figure out what we are all up to and use his or her intelligence to figure out a way of stopping us benefitting. But Google uses a program and, as you know if you have used a machine translator, programs are not nearly as good at figuring stuff out. So G has a choice - they can try to rewrite their algorithm so that it can somehow figure out the difference between Ad Coop-generated BLs and human generated BLs, or they can say, "Forget it! Those Coop sites only account for 0.00001% of the sites out there so who cares!" Now I am guessing that they have much bigger, spammier fish to fry, so I am really not that concerned. (And they have me in the sandbox anyway so how much worse can it get????)