Use "nofollow" On Ads:

Hi,

I recently revisited the Co-Op after a period away, to set up more ads and I noticed there's now an option to use 'no follow' on ads.

In the past I did well from the backlinks I earned, but I only got about one visitor a week who actually clicked on a link from another member.

Surely this change defeats the whole object, as the main value of the co-op is from the backlinks and very few of us get traffic from the links?

Linda

 

personal experience told me.

 

Thanks - however using DP Co-Op pushed me to the top of two search engines for several keywords and it happened soon after I joined, so I doubt it was a coincidence. And I did well from that and will always be very grateful, as I earned enough to stop me from going out of business. But as I said in my first posting, I got virtually no traffic from the links. Getting one visitor per day or week from the Co-Op isn't worth the time spent in setting things up, as these visitors were just surfing around and were too few in number to count for much.

Hence my coming to the conclusion that the value is in the backlinks, not in the traffic.

I might add that you personally have helped me on many occasions, thanks, so I've no wish to stir things - but I just wondered why the change was made, as it seems that a major benefit has been lost.

 

The change was made because of a great amount of circumstantial evidence that sites might have been getting penalized for linking to bad neighborhoods as a result of coop links. The rel=nofollow was added to address these concerns. Basically adding rel=nofollow allowed sites who wanted to participate in something that would help direct human visitors to their site, but did not want to risk the wrath of Google for participating in a link exchange scheme.

If your primary reason for participating in the coop network was to inflate your PR, then you should probably rethink your site promotion tactics. There are so many better ways to improve one's backlink count.

 

Thanks, didn't know that.

 

And some ways are?

 

Soliciting backlinks on your own site. You'd be suprised how many users are willing to link to their favorite pages if one simply asks. To make it as easy as possible, I actually a code snip that can be copied and pasted at the bottom of everyone of my pages that is specific for each page. If the content of a site/page is good people will link to it. By asking people to link and providing them with linking code you make it that much easier, thus increasing the number of people who will link to your site.

 

Good idea. I was just thinking the same.