Matt Cutts says Co-op is bad???

no you didn't, it can only be bad if you overuse it though

 

I think that just about hit's the nail on the head. ALL seo tactics should really result in penalties as nothing we do is natural, hwever in moderation it's white hat.

 

Theres a difference between building a page properly in order for it to be indexed well and actually optimising a page.

 

just be reasonable and don't overoptimize..

 

That's one popular strategy. The other is "just overoptimize and don't be reasonable". Strangely, both seem to work in the short run.

 

Another thing about ad networks like Coop and LV is that you need to rely on the stability of the central network so heavily. I'm not suggesting that these networks will disappear from the face of the earth in a year or two, nor am I wishing that, but it's not impossible. If and when that happens, whatever you benefit from Coop, LV or both will be nullified because these ad networks cannot function without the core. That makes me a bit uneasy when I think about how I should build, optimize and promote my sites in the long term.

 

Which central network are you talking about??

 

The server(s) that manages and allocates ads.

 

Servers, bandwiths etc. are getting cheaper by the day. So, even if an ad network gets really busy with time it will be cheaper to upgrade systems in the future.

 

Agreed with both the choices in short run

 

the only thing that doesn't work is if you don't optimize at all

 

Update!

I significantly reduced co-op weight from some of my pages to see if that would get that web site unpenalized.

The site is still penalized in general, but in specific the page I reduced weight to fell from #1 to #3. It had been pegged at #1 for quite some time.

 

You were penalized but #1?

What am I missing here? That makes no sense to me. If "penalized" means a #1 ranking, shouldn't we all be trying to get "penalized"?

 

h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0h0...

Sorry, I left out some detail...

This site was penalized across the board on hundreds of SERPS.

But, not on all of its SERPS. A number of SERPS escaped the penalty. Somewhere around a dozen.

My working theory is that pages with inbound links escaped the penalty, but that they are no longer able to give relevance to the other pages on this site. But, again, that's just a working theory.

 

There are way too many variables as to whether lv or DPCo-op etc is bad. EG one person runs a small interlinking network between its sites. 100 sites, all owned by the same person, all on the same server.

Person #2 is part of a small interlinking network that links between the 100 sites in the network. The sites are owned by different people, and are spread across almost 100 servers.

How can you honestly treat the 2 scenarios above the same?

In the first instance we are talking about heavy duty cross linking (which is what Shoey was done for). In the second it is just niche advertising!

If the first site got banned it would be NOTHING to do with the system of linking, it would be PURELY down to the links themselves. Heavy duty crosslinking.

As Shoey rightly states, no-one has ANY prrof in writing that co-operative linking harms your site. Google state not to do anything to artificially inflate your PR, and to keep away from link farms. But Matt has also stated that the Algo is 'pretty good' at identifying and devaluing paid links. (for paid I would read artificial).

I have a feeling that Google have brought in some sort of 'block level link analysis' into their algo, and that is why we have seen such a change recently.

 

Can you explain what you mean by "block level link analysis"?

 

Block level link analysis is looking at the physical locations of the links on the page. So, areas like headers, footers and side columns are put under a slightly stronger microscope and possibly given less weight than the yummy goodness that the links in center content may gain. I believe that Microsoft was looking at this a couple of years ago, but is pretty straight forward.

 

I second that.

OWG, are you referring to G analysing pages in sections as a way to try and more easily identify paid links?

 

omfg die thread