I think if we remain just a few, then search engines will close their eye, but if one year from now there is one million web sites, search engines will start complaining and possibly ban our web sites, not to mention regular users abuses of the system (cef. kiddy porn web sites infiltrating the network recently...)
The "kiddie porn" site never infiltrated the co-op. There never was a kiddie porn ad (or anything linking to kiddie porn) in the co-op at any point. As I said in the other thread, the thing about the Internet is people can link to anything they want. What happened was the site linked TO normal websites in the co-op, not the other way around.
Regardless of any changes by search engines, if it gets to saturation point, most websites will have thousands of backlinks and the advantage will be dampened down. I only just joined, so I hope I am fortunate enough to benefit before that happens.
Why is it that the newbies with 4 post are always the ones complaining and crying and saying that the coop will get you banned?
I know, fryman "Is it better to have more or less members in the co-op network?" I wish a whole bunch of people just like me would join
Google has billions of web sites and billions of pages indexed. If the co-op grew to 250,000 members it would still represent a miniscule portion of the total indexed pages. There is no way the co-op will ever "dampen down" the effect of backlinks on PR and or SERP's.
I don't post a lot, but I visit this forum almost everyday I just hope this network always remains valuable as it is. It's a great invention
There will come a time when links are used much less for establishing SERPs, that I can guarantee. But it won't be because of the Coop. Instead it will be because the technology will be there to evaluate and rank sites without needing link popularity. Why are people so worried about tommorow to the point that they won't use a great advertising tool. SEO is all about today because it changes so fast. If you practise good diverse SEO, the Coop network is then just one piece of the puzzle. If you rely merely on it, then some day you will get burnt. This is true of ANY tool. Its like at the height of Yahoo, only putting your effort into keyword percentage. Unfortunately more and more people are looking at the Coop Network expecting some magic beans and then complaining when they aren't number 1 in a week. Educate yourself on all SEO aspects, not just link popularity from one source!
Co-op is just a network of websites offering adspace to each other. Better position on search engines is a side effect, quite nice anyway. It's perfectly fine with Google TOS as long as displaying links on websites is not condemned.
Disagree! Yes, it changes real fast and that's exactly why you shouldn't apply your SEO skills for today. It will be useless 'tomorrow'. That's why it's important to not focus on rankings until you're blind. Like you mention, they will move away from voting as the main denominator. That's why you have to build quality content. It will attract links, publicity, customer appreciation and long term value plus good content is automatically future proof in that a well written article is easy to be linguistically evaluated and interpreted by the smart bots and algo's of the next few years. On Topic: More is better. More spread of your ads/links means wider exposure and more unique votes.
IMO it should be kept to a limited number, with a waiting list to join, and a continual "pruning" of existing members to improve quality. Let's face it, most sites don't need hundreds/thousands of links with targeted anchor text, those that do, should not be in the Coop IMO....
Funny you should mention that (an application/waiting list of sorts)... Lately I've been thinking about the same thing. Or at least a multi-tier membership system, with the tiers based on the quality of the site. The drawback to this is that it puts a substantial workload on reviewers (already every ads is reviewed). And since it's subjective, it would need to be reviewed by more than one reviewer (sort of like a voting system where the average quality vote is used). Something like that is a little ways away though, and nothing more than one of the many ideas bouncing around my head. The immediate needs of the network will be addressed first... restructuring of the weighting system, splitting up ad delivery by theme and language, per ad statistics (for example impressions). The ad network is a *very* small part of what I do, and really nothing more than a hobby/experiment... I have to spend most of my time on "real" things... like writing ISP billing/account software.
{lol} Figure out a way to clone me (at my current age with brain intact) and you could speed up the development process. In fact, if you figure it out, I'll purchase 10 of me for $1M each as slaves. Maybe then I would feel like I'm not 10 years backed up on my own projects. heh
I have an 18 year old who resembles me (mentally) too much for comfort, having 10 of them would make you the slave ;-)
One Shawn is enough, I can't have 10 of you watching me Give me a 100 grand for one of me and forget the 10 Shawn's