You say that your site has been up for a few years now. The Search Engine rules have changes a lot since the time you were first online. Competition has gone up as well, but there have been some drastic improvements in search technology and algorithms. It is possible that you had been ranking highly (#1) due to a high keyword density, meta tags, titles tags etc. for a few years. But, in the recent past on-page factors are looked at less and less, as these are things that webmasters can change and control. Google in particular now looks at links, anchor text and many other factors. It is possible that you simply did not keep up with the changing market. Also, the fact that your site ranks highly in Yahoo and MSN is no indication of what it's rank should be in Google.
My site has been online since 1998...and ranked #1 for most of that but sometimes bouncing between #7 and #2. I'm aware of how Google ranks the search results. My competitors have less page rank than mine. My competitors have less incoming links than mine. My competitors have much much small sites than mine so less indexed pages (by thousands of pages). I'm saying...I didn't drop from #1 and I'm whining about it. I'm saying I dropped from #1...to NO WHERE. I am not in any search results AT ALL for ANY keyword phrase. There are over 700 pages indexed (down from over 200,000)...but none of them show up in search results. This is not competitors knocking me off the Google map. I'm #1 in MSN and #3 in Yahoo. This is Google deliberately removing me from search results for penalty. Oh...but my page rank is STILL the same.
I'd like to chime in with a bit of caution about REMOVING DP code in case you've come to believe that having it does harm to your site. If you had many thousands of links pointing to your site (provided you pointed some weight AT your site), wouldn't loosing those thousands links hurt anyways, no matter how little such links might have previously been adding? So, for someone deeply entrenched, it might be better to simply stay put.
I have honestly come to believe that the search engines "G" included like to keep it a bit mixed up. Too much focus on anyone would in itself be unfair in a wildly growing and evolving internet. There are dozens of datacenters and from what I can tell they often have greatly differing results for the same search terms. Maybe something akin to a "Crazy Ivan" technique where various filters are applied and released in a random or maybe experimental fashion?
Based on past experience, Google is probably not going to penalize you for using the Coop or LinkVault or similar schemes. What they are much more likely to do (and perhaps are already doing) is simply nullify the links, discount them, i.e., NOT count them... just as they have done with certain bought-and-paid-for links. They simply remove the benefits. I dumped the Coop on two sites several months ago now. Interestingly, I noticed no effect at all. That tells me two things: (1) it probably wasn't providing me with any further benefits by the time I dumped it, and (2) it doesn't hurt to dump it if you're worried about it.
isn't that a standard reply to any re-inclusion request? I suppose I could test it out..but someone else here has to have gotten that same email and can confirm this..
Fro my experiences I havent found this to be true. If you build a good link profile and are well established, displaying co-op ads hasn't seemed to have had a negative impact in any way. By the way, DP does display coop in the archive how do you think it get's such massive weight?
You can give me the url of the site if you like and I'll take a squint at how compliant with webmaster guidelines your site is.
Ditto. It sounds like you're talking about a forum, right? If so, what you're describing sounds like what's been hitting a lot of forums since Big Daddy. What forum software are you using?
Kathy, How much coop weight did you point at your site and how many different anchors and urls did you use? I've knocked myself as well as others out of the SERPs by sending too much weight ... of course it's possible. I'm a strong believer in the power of links whether its through a network or buying them outright or trading for them or whatever. But if you jump in and start playing with fire without doing due diligence on your own and without some understanding of the risks involved ... well, that's just a bit reckless IMO. There are many, many possibilities for why your SERPs got nerfed. The coop is a possibility but the truth is noone except G engineers know for sure and you're not going get the information out of them. The emails you've posted look generic to me so they really don't provide any insight. If you have the weight and distribution info and could post it I'd be very interested. Here's an old discussion and my personal thoughts on rsisk with coop weight http://forums.digitalpoint.com/showthread.php?t=21253&highlight=experiment .. NOTE: I'm still a big fan and big user of coop. Thanks, Nitin
As you see until this happened to me, I didn't participate in dp link coop discussions. I followed the instructions when I signed up...and pointed all my weight (most of the time, at least 80% of it) to my site with one anchor. No instructions caution otherwise. I've removed the link so I can't tell you how much weight...but it was decent. I'm a big-board. Yes, its a forum. Yes, its vbulletin. If you want the url, I'll send it via PM as I'd rather not have lots of rubber neckers. For those that want it, you can tell me how you deem me compliant or non-compliant and be Judge Judy....
May I also say.... that I have other vbulletin communities who are fine in the indexing numbers and search results. I also have other pals who are big board admins....with vbulletin...and they haven't lost anything in the indexes of Google nor in their search results. In the pack of online webmasters/admin that I "run with" I am the only one with this issue....and it looks like penalty to them too instead of Big Daddy mess.
If you get a specific response from Google saying that having coop links on your page is bad then please post that. The fact is what you recieved is a standard response and wasnt taylored to your website. When I was nuked in google it was because of to much interlinking within my own domains.
2 years, or somewhere close to that with COOP (however long it has been around). It has never been anything but good for me, and I will be damned if yet another "COOP is bad" thread here, (we have seen how many of these?) is going to scare me away.
Basically I had 8 versions of the same site all linking to eachother =) that was in my case anyway. How come nobody ever mentions seroundtable.com has ran coop on there frontpage since the START of coop yet its still linked to and from google sites and even from matt cutts blog. AND it somehow manages to have decent pr HOW CAN THAT BE OMG!!