Five days ago my consolidated weight doubled when I added coop links to a new site I have. For the last four days my google serps have been going down... I'm not sure if this is related. Could the growth in the number of backlinks be hurting me? My sites are old and have been in the network for a while (sandbox is not a factor). If it is hurting my serp position, is there a way to limit the growth rate (slow weight increases down) without taking sites off the coop (which would cause my weight to decrease)? Anyone else experience a similar phenomenon? My serps have been on an upward trend for months, this may just be a temporary blip. I expect to have another weight increase during the next pr update.
Would you care to keep us posted on the development of your serps? It is more interesting when we get to know about the development over time.
I'm experiencing something similar with a couple of HUGE terms. One has 200M results (Online Education).. and the other is distance learning, which is also very competitive. I was on the first page for both terms, number 8 and number 7 on Google. Now they dropped seven positions. btw, I have 600k+ weight. About a third is pointed at these two terms. I'm trying to figure out the cause of the drop. I've been doing some other heavy seo. So it's not just co-op links. I'll post, if I see any further drops or improvements.
Why not just set up a placebo in your account, i.e www.google.com. Aim most of your weight towards this one then slowly increase the weight towards your site and see if this helps.
I am sure it is all relative to how many new links your site normally gains per period. Two of my sites were gaining minimal links per period and then I put 50,000 weight at it and next thing I knew the number of indexed pages went down 90%. I am preparing to put weight at a new site and have been considering how to do this. I already utilize a 'placebo' ad to soak up extra weight so that I can control how fast links are added. "btw, I have 600k+ weight. About a third is pointed at these two terms." My rough calculation is that you are going to add about 40,000 new links within a month for those two terms. That HAS to set off flags with Google (unless you typically gain that many new links every few weeks). Just this week Google was awarded a patent on utilizing historical data to identify artificial link building. Highly recommended reading here: http://forums.searchenginewatch.com/showthread.php?t=4978 and here: http://www.threadwatch.org/node/2132
Duh, why didn't I think of that? I will probably leave as is right now and see what happens, but if I get a sudden increase with the next pr update I may bleed some off to another url. Ha, Summer, I knew someone would chip in and offer to help like that Just didn't know who. I think I'll use a different site of mine to shed some weight off on. Mine are also very competitive, 58M results in a money keyword. I've lost within about the same range as you, taking me off first page and onto second. Hopefully it's temporary.
I don't like the look of this at all. Here are a few quotes. >>>Link Behavior 22. History data scores might also consider the "behavior of links over time". 23. The appearance and disappearance of links figure into the scoring for link behavior (from #22). 24. The appearance/disappearance of links are dated by Google and used in the scoring. 25. The link appearances/disappearances are monitored and Google measures "how many links... appear or disappear during a time period, and whether there is a trend" toward more links or fewer links. The temporal (time-based) nature of groups of links will be scored by Google.<<< >>>So basically they are analyzing register information for how many years you are dedicating to the domain and because they want to see the interconnectivity of all your domains. Then they are looking at fresh index types of data such as staleness of a page and how many links point to it. Plus if those links stay pointing to it or not.<<< >>>[0115] Search engine 125 may also analyze upward and downward trends to add or remove the document (or more specifically, a path to the document) from the bookmarks/favorites lists, the rate at which the document is added to or removed from the bookmarks/favorites lists, and/or whether the document is added to, deleted from, or accessed through the bookmarks/favorites lists. If a number of users are adding a particular document to their bookmarks/favorites lists or often accessing the document through such lists over time, this may be considered an indication that the document is relatively important. On the other hand, if a number of users are decreasingly accessing a document indicated in their bookmarks/favorites list or are increasingly deleting/replacing the path to such document from their lists, this may be taken as an indication that the document is outdated, unpopular, etc. Search engine 125 may then score the documents accordingly. <<< And this is an excellent read.....http://www.socengine.com/seo/guide/google-historical-data-patent.html from Randfish
If a group of people decided to point huge weight at google, would they abide by their own importance reducing techniques?
LOL, that is an interesting take on it. However what has google have to loose? They only have a few main webpages and the rest are just search results, millions of people already know to type www.google.com withought having to search for it.
Maybe, maybe not...... Let's say I have 500 static links and growing, 500 dynamic links and growing. Trend is upward, even though some come and go. It may tend to lower the value of the coop to those using it - and only it - as their seo plan. Use it as an ad coop and continue building static links elsewhere and I think all will be well. .
I guess but I would still take precaution, maybe a slight update to the co-op code which will take note of the links that a website has during a google backlink update and will return these same links everytime around the end of the month when another update may happen. Actually now that I think about it that may not work too well. It's hard to think when I dont' know exactly how the co-op code works
It will get to the point where there is so much you cannot do and so little you can do, with google, that a simple page with: Please contact us at br549. will be the only thing they will index. As bad as they are getting now, if it continues to get worse, I'll put code in place to detect the referer and if from google, put a temp page up that tells the user to start using MSN or Yahoo. Too many links, too few links, too many links from sites that are not same theme. Too many links to your site with your company name, not enough variety of links to your site with different names. Not been around long enough. Been around long enough, got a news link that went to xml feed, now you are penalized because of so many links. Too many links too quick. Someone at www.acrosstherailroadtracks.com linked to you, now you have a bad neighborhood penalty. Next thing you know, google will come up with a penalty for farting in your sleep
All advertising networks on the internet offer links to the webpage for visitors. Take Adsense as an example, you dont see surfers having to copy and paste url's into address bars to visit these sites. If adsense is classed as an advertising network, why can't the Coop? The only difference I can see is that the links are spiderable and can help your search engine rankings which is an additional benefit
Hahahah, that was too funny, but sadly getting to be very true. We need more search engine diversion like back in the old days. I would love to se Altavista get ressurected(sp?) Also there is an open source search engine in the works called Nutch I believe, will see how that impacts google.
The profits the big 3 SE are making these days means they will just buy any other smaller search engine that gains market share or has useful technology.