I think that the co-op is a great service but I notice that most of the ads. on my site (www.car-hub.com) have nothing to do with the theme, and so I believe that they will not have much positive impact on search ranking. In fact they even be detrimental. Wouldn't it be better to enable specification of keywords, so that only relevant ads. are selected? It seems to me that the current arrangement bears some resemblance to a 'link farm', whereas relevant links would be more like a web ring. See articles like http://www.netmechanic.com/news/vol5/promo_no7.htm for details. Cheers ... Richard Prosser
There is plenty of evidence to support my view that quality is better than quantity. The network may not be treated (by the search engines) as a link farm now, but I wouldn't be surprised if it is in the future - unless the links are made more relevant.
Link relevancy has not gotten into the aglo yet. I've researched over 100 sites. No profound evidence yet. However, Shawn has made a smart move to categorize the ad. Soon, we'll have targeted links. Prevention is always better than cure.
SEBasic, It depends on the volume of text on the page I would say. As we all know, the anchor text in a link is treated as a brindge between the anchor page and the target page. So if you have anchor text that is off topic , and very litle (like half a dozen or so words of text) on your page, then technically it is possible for non relevent text to damage your rankings. But and it is a huge but, if your site is that bad, then it can't be operating in anywhere near a competitive environment, and you shouldn't need the co-op anyway There is no doubt that the SE's wil bring in semantic relationships into the algo, as it is the only way to grade links, they palyed with it during Florida update, so we can assume they intend using it. That said there is a school of thought that there is 'some' sematic filter running, but nothing that can affect the overall benefit of volume ads. E.G you get 5,000 backlinks that gives you a boost score of say 20,000 (made up figure for example) lets say that the relevancy filter cuts that in half, then your still 10,000 up than you were with no links. It would take something really bad to have a negative effect on the rankings, and personally I can't see it .
OWG, I agree 100% with what you said... The key part being that SE's will put this kind of thing into play... They haven't yet (Well, I've seen no evidence that they have anyway)...