In the "Notifying webmasters of penalties" entry on the Matt Cutts blog 26 April 2006. T2DMan Matt Cutts What does this mean??? could Google tell using its automated algos that the site was part of the Co-op??? was the site given a manual penalty because it was part of the co-op??? Note: The site is no longer using the co-op, and the problem on the site began right at the time that a 302 link was made into the site. I actually believe that the issue is not with co-op links, but with Googles handling of the 302 link. But Matt made the comment, and he made no mention of the 302 issue that I had highlighted. Background There has been a new initiative at Google sitemaps where it will tell you it a site has any penalty on it. I have a clients site that I have been having real issues with getting the sites rankings back - following a 302 link that destroyed the site in Sept 2004. The pages of the site are all cached nicely in Google, but he is not ranking even for his business name. Great rankings on Yahoo and MSN. I have filed a number of reinclusion requests and not got anywhere. So seeing the new sitemaps feature I thought I would give it a try - but no penalty shown on the Google sitemap. So I wrote the above mentioned note on Matt's blog and got his rather interesting reply. What are people's thoughts on Matt Cutt's comments, and experiences with the co-op?
This arguement has been beaten to death in 2004-2005. Like REALLY REALLY Hard. I'd suggest looking back in the old threads there is plenty of arguements with webmasters vs google vs co-op and viceversa
Yes, but have you ever seen such a direct comment from anyone in "the know" as the comment by Matt Cutts. And check out the ranking of the "Charity" experiment that has been happening with the co-op. Not exactly hot. 67th on Google at the moment, and Shawn says that he is still linking. Top ten would say that something was working well.
The two ways of being in the coop 1. Having Coop ads/links on your site 2. Having your site's ad run in the Coop Network. Just like there's two aspects of link buying 1. You sell links on your site 2. You buy links on other sites. "If" it seems like sites can be penalized for buying too many links or just being in the COOP wouldn't this be the way to dampen the results of a competitor? Was this the reason why Matt Cutts had his blog taken out of the rotation? Certainly I think many people with extra weight are pointing the weight at sites they don't own or just boost other sites they might like. Will there be a new rule stating you can only input sites you own or sites you have permission to include?
I wouldn't read too much into the experiment however 1/ It shows the charity site is NOT banned 2/ 10,000 in weight then is not comparable with 10k weight today so it would natuarally have less effect in my mind
Google can spot sites showing coop ads easily by looking for the validation image served by http://ads.digitalpoint.com/. The issue is that google can also spot sites that get short term back links - links only present for 1 page load. Whether these links are coop links or not is irrelevant they are still not good links. A site that has a large proportion of these links will be penalized whether they are coop links or otherwise. As long as you don't point too much weight at sites you will be fine.
just searched on dp and found another mention of co-operative link networks http://forums.digitalpoint.com/showthread.php?t=47550 Matt Said, December 30, 2005 @ 12:42 pm Seems like getting totally out of networks, then getting reinclusion is the way to do it. But my question, hard to know if it was a manual penalty, or something the algos found. True, the charity site is still in the serps.
It's not just a coop issue, there are similar exchanges all over the web. The key issue, for me, and I'm glad Olney has raised it, is one of being able to harm a site you don't manage. My understanding has always been that the search engines will disregard links that it considers to be spammy but that there will be no actual penalty. We all have sites we'd love to banish from Google. I'd hate to see webmasters have the ability to do that.
Maybe the sites that are penalised are those that run the ad's. The sites that they point to just receive no benefit?
I thought Link Vault was the only big and google-safe link exchange program since like really long?? Old news.
Link Vault can still be considered to breaching these pointers http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=35772
While I'm not defending the coop, I know it works at least in some cases. I know of a dp member that is ranked number one for a REALLY profitable keyword in google. He has been there for a long time. I think he points about 300k coop at it at any given time.
Isn't this the most unfair question of a webmaster? Of course we would do a lot different if it wasn't because of search engines. If search engines didn't exist for me they wouldn't exist for my competitor as well. In fact most of my competitors wouldn't create a site in the first place.
Link farms get penalised. Co-operatives may and I stress, may, be disregarded. There's a big difference.
I noticed a huge drop in my indexed pages in the last few weeks...draining downward from over 200K to less than 1K. In search results under keywords, where I was #1 for several years (or #2) I suddenly disappeared from all results. Contacting Google for help they simply pointed to the "quality guidelines" and said when I've fixed the problem on my site, to let them know. I didn't know I was penalized but had thought there was a problem with big daddy.... The only thing that is remotely "iffy" would be my ad_network links from the coop. I've removed it...and now am awaiting an email from Google if I guessed right as the biggest frustration in this entire ordeal has been the not knowing what happened and what it is I did to cause it. No details...just pointing to the rules and guessing it must be the links. Be very aware....Matt Cutts is hinting that the "co op link exchange" is a concern.
I think deep down many of us thought the co-op would be against the google TOS. - I did, but I wasn't concerned, they're not going to penalise sites in it because someone else could have added my site, right? If they ARE penalising sites in the co-op this is very very bad. I thought they'd just devalue the links. Edit: t2dman: I think we're missing the point here. Did you point links at your site? Or put links on your site? Or both? Clearly a webmaster is in charge of his own domain, google would (well, should) only penalise those with links ON their domain. Anyone can points links at anyone...