Should the COOP use NOFOLLOW tags to prevent SERP penalties?

BR, you're on a loser here, I tried a similar "poll" about 18 months ago, with fairly similar results, interestingly there seems only one active member left from those days....

http://forums.digitalpoint.com/showthread.php?t=8223&highlight=rel+no-follow+attribute

 

I count at least 10

Summer
Shawn
Me
Mike (Blogmaster)
Stephen (nevetS)
Smyrl (She is even a Mod now)
ferret
Johannn (He always posts in one month spurts)
joeychgo
mopacfan

I do miss owlcraft though

Pick any thread from a year ago and I bet half the people aren't active anymore

 

It was interesting rereading that thread. I wonder how close we are now to the coop being themed. If it's coming from the horses mouth that linking out to unthemed sites is the cause of deindexing, then it would be apparent that relying on Google to calculate weight is a bit flawed, no?

 

I don't know how true it is that deindexing has anything to do with theme (again, I think there has been cock up after cock up) but I would certainly support theming at this point as it makes a whole lot more sense then nofollow (From both an Advertising standpoint AND an SEO one)

 

Its interesting to see though that there is a majority (currently 58% ) of people that would prefer it if the COOP did use the nofollow tag. It also defiantely seems like there are two camps here ( and in almost equal propertions ) - ones that want to use COOP for SERPS and those that want to use it for advertising.

 

Again, you are making assumptions using a flawed poll...Why are people who say no to nofollow labelled as not wanting it for advertising

 

Mate I always take so called official statements with a grain of salt. I only have my own personal experiences to go by. Maybe it's not a theming issue but to be more exact a coop issue. From what I am seeing, sites serving up coop ads are dying a slow death in Google. You only have to look right here on the DP archive to see the effect.

 

Are you talking about sites with the coop on them (All the complaints in the weight section) or sites with coop weight pointed AT them?

 

Sites with coop on them.

 

I would argue that those are the type of sites that have been more affected then any other by Big Daddy and it doesn't have anything to do with the Coop itself.

A LOT of the sites (all you need to do is check your link: in google if you are in the Coop) are large database driven sites with very similar content on each page. My original point was that these kind of sites were getting hammered int he last few months. I had two huge forums (150,000 pages plus) with no coop anywhere on them that suddenly had 100 indexed pages.

What has been strange is that Google has been re adding around 1 to 2k of pages a week.

To me right now it all points to the Google issues with indexed pages and the site: command

All this in mind, I still support themed listings though if only for the advertising benefit

 

How can you put forums in that category - where are the similar pages?

 

I think this option should be present in the AD generation step :

Use nofollow : Yes/No.

 

The point is people in the network are very concerned that they are going to get hit with penalities for linking their sites out to irrelevant spammy sites - and they have a right to be, for 1/. Matt Cutts has given explicit examples of where sites have been hit buy a penalty for irrelevant outgoing links: http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/indexing-timeline/ - have a read of the examples.

Now we know that the nofollow tag is used buy google to discount it as a vote for the site - i.e it is a way of protecting you if you are linking to dubious sites http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/seeing-nofollow-links/.

So if you want to protect yourself in google from the penalities detailed in Matt Cutts thread, then adding the nofollow tag should do the trick (or any type of link that does not count as a vote so JS or serverside redirect).

So if you want to protect yourself from the penalities provided above, then surely you would want to do so, as if you are only in the COOP for advertising, why do you give a dam what type of link the link is - its going to send you exactly the same amount of traffic.

 

If Yahoo does not follow the tag what good is it going to do?

You can always drop out of the network if you have so much fear, Expertu has a good suggestion also!

 

Exactly...Wait, why am I agreeing with you

Also, if you want to take Matt Cutts as gospel truth, the go ahead but you can't force all of that on everyone. Google controls the examples so they can do whatever they want to prove that all of these issues aren't failures by them that have nothing to do with controling link manipulation.

I don't get what you are after and why having themed links wouldn't be a WAY better solution as it would increase CTR for advertisers.

 

Where have you seen people getting penilised by Yahoo? - Its google they are getting penilised by, so would it not be a resonable idea to use the method google recommends to not get penilised?

 

Until Google can get their index straight, which may be a while, why worry

 

oops voted for the wrong choice.

 

Wow - I had no idea the Co-op only had 17 webmasters in it...

 

Themeing is fine - never said it wasn't its a good idea - however that clashes with adsense T&C's so you can't run both that and COOP on the same site. That pretty much drops that idea like a stone.

I don't take Matt Cutts as gospel - never said I did - however if: -
Matt Cutts - "says they are penilising sites for irrelevant spammy links".
Google's patent - "specifically has various info relating to to the above".
COOP Members - "are seeing their sites penilised"
Google - "States in webmaster guidelines do not join link networks which try to manipulate PR or Rankings"
Search Engines - "Hate it when thinks are used to manipulate rankings and will do anything to stop it happening"
Google - "Has finally released Big Daddy which (part of it) is supposed to target link manipulation"

I think given all the above you would be fairly stupid to think it is all a conspiracy and links networks which manipulate SERPS are not being or going to be targetted - Maybe they are actually being targetted...............???????