One of the site owners wants me to remove co-op completely from his site. The site has about 6,000 in weight. All the weight are from the site and is used to point to his site. I like to warn him of the consequences for removing co-op if there is any? Does anyone know what would happens to his SERP if I removed Co-op completely? 1) Nothing, Stay the same? 2) SERP Drop like mad (penalized by Google for large link fluctuations)? 3) Improve in SERP (because co-op is seen as "unnatural linking" by Google)? What do you think will happen?
With what's going on with the SERPS right now, I probably wouldn't do anything until the dust settles. Has he/she had a drop in rankings that he thinks is COOP related?
The SERP did drop a bit for all the keywords. Traffic dropped 50%. That's what prompted the owner to consider removing co-op from his site. I tried to tell him it's "advertising"... What do you guys think about the fact the "charity" experiement website dropped from #18 to nowhere? or do you think the charity site dropped because it violated some other SEO guideline for it drop that much?
some guy on DP just PM'd me conviced that his site is penalized because of the CO-OP I hope the co-op isnt why people are taking hits
I think it is too hard to generalize that it is the co-op causing sites to drop. As many have stated before, they have sites not in the co-op that have dropped.
Do they care about their MSN traffic? The co-op still gives a lot of benefit to SERPS on MSN so removing the co-op is likely to hurt the MSN rankings/traffic. I have several domains with top ten rankings with MSN that I know are due to the co-op. I personally believe the co-op benefits yahoo SERPS in some situations - especially if the domain is an older one. So I think the decision might factor in the age of the domain. If this is a new domain, removing co-op in unlikely to affect google rankings even if you believe the co-op isn't giving you any benefit with google. I DO believe that the recent change with google is tied in part to text links - co-op or not. Whether they have just decided to devalue or ignore these links is anyone's guess. I am going to wait until the latest swings settle down before making any decision as I believe tweaks are still being made to whatever it is google is currently doing and I am never fast to react to any sudden google shift because it can correct itself by just giving it some time. If you do decide to remove the co-op, I would give it at least 30-45 days before you should even think about seeing any possible changes in google rankings.
I've never done coop on any of my sites, never used hidden text, link farms, etc. Never spammed keywords, have lots of natural links, no bad stuff at all. Hell, I'm not even ranking for any good keywords on Google. As of last night, I went from 413 links on Google (by searching for web address, not by link down to 186. A 60% drop. I went from #3 for the two keywords in my domain name to off the charts... N/A. Once again, I've never used coop or done anthing shady that could have caused this. This is just some random crap from Google. PS - I'm slowly and steadily making my way up the rankings for VERY competitive keywords on Yahoo and MSN. Especially MSN, they show me lots of lovin. I'll be using the coop once many of my new sites get cached and ranked, so I can have some weight. Theirs just no way coop could be the cause of the recent ranking problems.
100% agree with mjewel i have a weight of 1500 and target a keyphrase of two words. i'm using co-op for 40 days now and rank between 2nd and 9th in msn. my site is 4-5 months old and one week ago, bum, it went 3rd on yahoo from 8.5 million results. the site is submitted in few directories and i didn't do any link exchange till now. it has nothing to do with "the best on-page optimization" because the entirely phrase is only in title and meta description, the second word, yes, is widely spread. i belive that it ranks well mainly (if not entirely) because of co-op.
It seems to me that MSN works the best with the CoOp as well.. I think Yahoo and Google aren't too crazy about it.. Maybe there's a way to change the way it's presented or something.. Maybe it's gotten too popular now...
That's a good point! co-op does bring lot of MSN traffic. They're still #1 on MSN. The site was SERP banned in Yahoo a few month ago. Now a major drop in Google. So.... the owner thinks all this is because of co-op. The site is about 2 years old.