I am reading a lot of requests to have the ads on a website more relevant towards that website they are shown on. Has anyone stopped to think of what kind of impact that would have? Let's say Shawn was able to implement some type of filter that would make it so that ads shown are related to the particular website they are on. Okay, that means that your website, in turn, will only be shown on other relevant websites. Let's say there are 10 websites out that deal with cars. Well, you are one of those 10, your link will only be shown on 10 websites instead of 6000 or even 100 websites.... it doesn't matter the amount. The whole point is that whomever goes for that will severely be decreasing their link popularity across the network and that will not be made up just because the sites are more relevant. I personally would rather have my link advertised on 6000 unrelated websites (and show the same on my site) rather than only 100 websites that deal with just gifts. Now, if you are concerned about traffic coming in from those websites, absolutely they should be more relevant but I think we are all seeing more traffic from the search engines rather than the websites themselves. Just my 2 cents..... anyone else have any thoughts?
You're right. I'm quite happy with the coop as it is - most of us can probably look for relevant links themselves, rather than having an algorithm do it (often quite inaccurately) for them. The random links from the coop do WORK and get you good SERP positions, significantly better than spending days on linking with high PR sites. I personally wouldn't enter a link-exchange scheme like this for only a few dozen links, even if they are incredibly relevant... I got those. No need anymore. They didn't result in great SERP placement - massive random links seem to do. Some control allowing you to select themed links if you think you absolutely need them would be a nice add-on, even though I won't use it for my main pages. However, it seems that the mass of links is coming from deep within large pages, and even if the front-page is themed, many of the pages carrying links are just fairly 'random content' stuff that has no real 'theme' anyway.
I still would rather have relevent links...even if it cut my number of BL's by 80%. Think about your customers when they come to your site and see a bunch of unrelated links at the bottom (looks a bit spammy). Plus, would you trust a site displaying foreign/unrelated ad's as much as one without the ad's at all? ....think about it.
Yep.. agreed, the unrelated links do look a bit odd on your landing page. We put them onto less significant pages where they don't really matter, as well as onto forum pages, and point adds to pages that need to look more serious - nobody says you have to run adds AND point adds to the same site From my stats, it seems if 5 textlinks are put on the bottom of a page, virtually everybody will ignore them. We've had adds running for 2 months on pages with around 25,000 uniques, and a grand total of 4 ppl clicked onto the links. Doesn't seem link many ppl note them.. But I agree that for some pages themed links would also be nice to have. BTW - foreign links... I noted that our pages with adds on, but without co-op links pointed to them rank higher in local (non-English) search engines than they ever did before. Maybe the SE picks up foreign language links and categorizes the page as more relevant for it's non-English target audience.. We do get a number of Polish and Japanese customers from pages that before never ranked in google.pl / google.co.jp.. nice side effect... non-English speakers also generate revenue
Relevant links would be better both for G and for inbound hits (which, I may add, are VERY slim and far between)
Leave relevant links for manual link building. There is no way really to get relevant links for everyone with the co-op.
Our sales have almost tripled since joining the network and we have ads on every page including the Credit card page. We have only been in the network for 3 weeks.