http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/indexing-timeline/ I am personally leaning towards sitemaps are not the fault in any way... However... I do suppose that one may attract more crawler attention to one's site... Which may be bad if you link to bad neighborhoods etc.
That might have an interesting slant on the future of the co op All my coop sites have been reduced by a huge amount compared to my none co op sites Anymore thoughts? Jamie
Yeah, there's about 7 pages of discussion (at this point) here: http://forums.digitalpoint.com/showthread.php?t=85615
The Coop can never have a negative effect on SERPs purely for the fact that anyone with some weight could point it at a competitor and effect their ranking. Google knows this. IMHO
well, Matt did mention that having weak inbound links will cause you to lose favour in Google's eyes....
Yeah. Cutts also said that the problems had been fixed. Uh-huh. Yeah. Right, Matt. Have a nice vacation...