Joined a few months ago. Shortly thereafter serps began to drop. They keep getting worse, from about #8 to #400+ and #60 to gone entirely. I cleaned the site of dead links, and validated all of the main pages, but it still kept dropping. Google cached the index.htm last week, and then it dropped more. The site has a weight of about 2000, and there are 20 ads setup with equal weight and different anchor text. See Graph As a test, I am considering dropping the coop for that site. Have any of you had any experience with dropping a site from the coop?
Can you give us your user code and password, so we can see your graph??? Just Kidding We can not see your graph....
The site that runs to coop may not be affected and may see a rise. The sites you point to from the coop may see a fall. Are you pointing the coop links to this one website, because you have three links in your signature. I am interested in what your doing and the final outcome. You can use the backlink tracker at DP print the graph and attach it here after a week or two.
My site was heavily penalized by G on 3 Feb. The only reason I could find was the coop. My rankings on msn and Y did not change. I removed the coop and I changed the file names to include the keywords and my rankings are now about 50% back where they were before the penalty. I won't put the coop on that site anymore but I have other sites I use to get weight and point to the ones I really care about. It's not a lot, but every little bit helps.
One of my forums was dropped from Google's index earlier this year. After a couple of months of this I decided to remove the coop. I changed the file names and within one (1) week my forum was back in the index. Was it the coop? I don't know. But I won't take the chance again.
I run a number of sites and have seen google drop a site (out of the top 1000) that ranked #1 for no reason-- only to come back within a month with no changes. Shortly after I joined the coop, I had another site drop that had been ranked very high for the last 6 months, experience a drastic drop. The only thing I had changed was adding them to the coop. I naturally wondered but gave it some time.... sure enough, the rankings came back to exactly where they had been. I have found that google is erratic and it makes it very hard to pinpoint the cause of a drop in rankings. Maybe it is by design? Anyway, I am thankful I did not pull the coop. I have only experienced good results from the coop.
I have just completely removed the Coop from my site. I used to rank in the top 10 for a keyword phrase with over 43,000,000 competing sites, and it's no where to be found for the last few months. The only thing I have done to the site was to add a rss feed which updates daily, and added the coop. I doubt the rss feed had anything to do with it, and I'm not even sure if the coop did, either. Google's cached page of my site is dated march of last year, even though it's been crawled since then. I'm not saying the Coop caused this, but I guess at this point it can't hurt to remove it. For me, it hasn't helped, as I get very few clicks from other member's sites, and advertising my link on a german or any other foreign site doesn't make much sense. Sure, it's given me over 1000 backlinks, but those don't seem to make any difference as far as traffic, PR, or anything else.
Interesting points from you folks. At one point I flew to the top of Google for 1 keyword. Since then, I have fallen down to around #40. And even more oddly, a forum member made post regarding something totally unrelated to my site content, and within 3 days, I was #1 for the search term "annoying coworker". I run a football website, so having that keword phrase vault like that over one thread was very odd. I dont know if COOP has anything to do with this or not. As for my latest experiences though, the keywords that I am using in the coop dont seem to be moving up at all. they will rise for a day or so, then they disappear again. Just like they were doing before I added them. Again, not accusing coop of hurting me at all, but just curious if maybe google has done something to block it from helping. I really dont know.
Therre are many things that can cause a rank drop, larryweiss. And you need to focus not only on your site, but also on your competitors. Maybe the drop in rankings wasn't because of something you did on your site, but because of something that your competitors did on THEIR sites which caused them to climb up. My main site is listed top 10 at google. I keep a very close eye on every single site that is listed there. If you were the webmaster of one of those sites, I bet I would even know more about them than you!