There's always plenty of speculation that the COOP hurts sites - I just wanted to report that it's helped mine. I have 3 very new sites (3 months old) that I did zero to very minimal link building for - I threw coop ads (about 3-4k overall) up for them and let them sit. 3 Months later Results: 1st Site ( has made $100+ ) - Ranks #1 MSN for 3 terms 2nd Site ( has made $450+ ) - Ranks #1 MSN for 2 Terms - Ranks #1 Yahoo for 3 Terms (5+ million results) - Ranks #2 Yahoo for 2 Terms 3rd Site ( has made $250+ ) - Ranks #1 MSN 2 Terms - Ranks #3 Yahoo 1 Term I don't consider any of the higher ranking terms to be "super competitive" but there are plenty of actively competing sites link building for them. So all in all, the coop might not be great for everyone but it's paid off nicely for me in this individual case PS: The terms are all (except two of them) 2 word terms and the others are 3 word terms.
1 of them ranked between #1-2 for a few weeks for the common mispelling (its 2 words combined) but doesn't currently.
yes the Coop works miracles for yahoo and MSN, but I haven't really noticed good results while using the coop from google.
You will never see good results in Google from using the coop... they are too smart for that and they know that the coop is just an advertising tool. Without good seo and quality backlinks you will never make it.
Not to doubt you fry.. but I can search almost any phrase in google and top 10 at least 1 site is complete Spam
Yeah, and I guess you are using the good old definition of "sites positioned above me", huh? If you think they are spam, then it must be easy to outrank them with a quality site, don't you think?...
Since I've made my share of Spam sites - sites full of nonsense pages meant to rank is what I'm talking about, no jealousy there - my motto is if you can't beat em, join em In an ideal world, sure. You don't honestly think that's what happens do you?
Yes, but only short term. I've experienced the same type of results you are showing and try to throttle weight to new sites, so that they are not bombarded with too many links at once. I have one site I put up the first week of December 2005. I put some weight to the front page, then picked three internal subcategories to throw some weight to as well. I'm enjoying first page results in google for quite a few terms and getting some good traffic, but it will be short lived. The same pattern as always; ranks well after a month or two, on google, for about 2-3 weeks, then drops off. Fortunately, Yahoo usually delivers increasing traffic to counter the drop from google. MSN...I always tend to rank well there, but it's like being top ten in a dirt digging contest. There's no reward! My best results, from numerous tests over the past (almost year) is to put a little weight on the index and 3-5 internal subcategories.
I have to disagree. For 1-2 rankings on MSN I recieve a good bit of traffic (sometimes 80% of a sites total). For a small effort and limited budget I'd say MSN pays off nicely.