I've removed the Co-op from one of my sites. It seemed logical anyway because there was hardly any relevance between the links and the content of my site:
It sure was interesting to see Matt pointing out that a seo contest link was a bad place to link to. The number of coop links pointing to the v7n contest sites over the last few weeks/months must have been huge. I bet every single site in the coop has been linking to a v7n contest site.
Google state, 'do not get involved in linking schemes designed to boost your page rank' Effectively wehen they say page rank they mean 'importance' as google uses importance and relevance as the mainstay of their algo. it is OBVIOUS to Stevie wonder, that any site that is linking to V7N or carcrasher etc SEO contents IS involved in artificial linking, and it would be prudent to punish them for it. Bait and switch, is all I have to say on this matter
So I finally dumped COOP. I've been playing with it on and off for about half a year and the last Matt's post finally nailed it when he came down on irrelevant links to and from your site. This is where the biggest difference between a COOP and a Webring is: the links from COOP are BADLY irrelevant. This has to hurt a site. Granted, I only had about 30,000 weight to play with, but there was no slightest positive traffic change after COOP ads started pointing to the sites. In fact ALL my sites that had COOP to or from are simply trashed in Google right now. I am not saying that this is COOP's fault but it could be that last factor that tripped Google's algo into sending the sites that could already have been in a week position (too new, considerable amount of duplication as in republished news and some canonical issues to top it) to trash.
note the piece in bold Isn't link buying and selling webspace the very essense of internet advertising? and the backbone of the concept of ADSENSE ? now you got me lost Mr Cutts, you sell more links than anyone on the frikkin' planet, is this a monopoly thing?
I will tell you this. I recently looked at all of our links and we are back down to 695 and none of them are from the coop. Is anyone seeing links still from the coop in Google? We are not. We are considering pulling out because of it. Wayne
Update for my sites: not exactly wonderful news but perhaps a glimmer of hope? Those several hundred (or a few thousand) old phpbb forum pages that were showing in the index even though they haven't existed for months are not showing tonight. However, there are still several (perhaps a dozen) static html pages showing that also haven't existed for months. So... POSSIBLY... (!)... Google is in the process of cleaning out the archaic listings? If so that might indicate progress. When all of the archaic listings disappear, might there be hope that the current listings might replace them? Yeah, I realize I'm grasping at straws probably but frankly Google is so f***ed up at the moment that any ever so slight movement towards sanity seems like cause for celebration. I can't wait for Matt Cutts to get back from his vacation. I sooo want to punch him right in the Halloween pirate face this week
therefore forcing people to advertise through adsense? .. what about if you sell links with a no follow tag applied? can Google differentiate and subsequently not penalise you? James.
I think he meant that everyone would be doing it to get "inflated" page rank ... if I read it correctly