Yahoo! is Penalizing Co-Op Sites [Proof]

The sites I had "Banned" had coop ads, not coop weight thrown at them

Food for thought...

 

You can also read this thread and make your own conclusions:

http://forums.digitalpoint.com/showthread.php?t=19524

 

Excellent point. Are we talking about coop ads or coop weight?

I can see where coop ads could cause a problem if you get a bad url, but weight?

 

It would stand to reason that "coop weight" would certainly be a volatile ingredient in getting a site penalized, assuming you say, add a massive amount of links to a new site over a very short period of time.

However, again, I have sites that have been banned for merely displaying coop ads. It makes no sense to me that a site would be banned for having outbound links (only 5 of them) on a given site. Inbound? I can see, but outbound? I cannot.

So given that my sites with outbound links are the ones that have had trouble with Yahoo, I can only assume that something else is up.

Anyway.

 

See, i look at it the other way - you have control (in a normallink exchange situation) of the links you display on your site, so if you are linking to a 'bad neighbourhood' (whatever that is) then it can be deemed as your own fault. Incoming links to your site could be set up by anyone, hence out of your control. Therefore it makes sense that if you were gonna be penalised for either, it would be for having ads on your pages.

 

This is backwards, no?

Chances are that google is not going to penalize you for a bad site linking to you, otherwise, anyone could create a 'bad' site and link to their competitor to get them removed.

On the other hand, if you are linking to a bad site, then you're responsible. It's in your area of control.

Tiptop has it right.

 

Yes I sure its just a natural re-correction

 

Jeremy, did you note any changes after you removed coop ads from your affected sites? If so, how long? One of my sites had major traffic from Yahoo this summer. Ten times the amount of traffic as all other SE's combined. After a few months though, Yahoo has all but disappeared. I had some major earnings during this time.

Sites where I only promote ads to, but not display them on, do quite well. I concur on the sites where ads are displayed, though I've never considered that pattern before. Of all the sites I have, only the ones that I have the ads on, seem to be affected with low/zero Yahoo traffic.

 

Nope, still not back yet. I have emailed yahoo, and have asked the site be re-indexed, but still nothing... 3 months now

The particular site in question is not a money maker, nor was it ever intended for that. It is just something my wife and I felt strongly about and provided free info to others about the subject matter on the site. There are only 30 pages in the site, it's not an SEO'd cash cow... Nothing, I mean, NOTHING about it should send off any signal/alarm to any SE. It is well designed, clean, and full of info/content.

Anyway, I'm not complaining. Yahoo traffic for me has always been crap. Their searches are rarely relevant. I use Yahoo.Com as much as Google, but not for searches. Maps, Stocks, and email.. That's it. For a portal, it's great, as an SE? YMMV.

 

I removed all co-op ads (as well as any links pointing to the site) from one of my sites that I manage. It's starting to come back to Yahoo SERP. It was not as high as it was before the ban (3-4 month ago). It used to be top 5 in Yahoo. Now it's around 15 on some of the keywords. I believe it will move up slowly..

I also emailed Yahoo regarding my site and why it was banned. I ask why I can be listed in the Yahoo directory (year after year) and paid $300 and be banned from Yahoo Search. This is the email I received:

========================================
Thanks for writing.

Yahoo! Directory does not have the same criteria for inclusion or ranking as the organic search results. For instance, Yahoo! Directory does not look at inbound links from other sites, whereas organic search is very sensitive to linking (and link-spamming.) That is an example of an area where rank can be quite divergent. Organic search is ranked by machine, not human, so a high rank in directory won't cause a high rank in organic.

We want to provide top quality search results for users, so an engineer will take a look at the ranking issue you describe.

Search Engine Spam Reporting
Yahoo! Corp.
=============================================

Reading this email, I immediately removed all co-op, a few weeks later, it started to come back in the SERP. Of course there is no way to know if my re-inclusion in the SERP is because the result of removing Co-op or because a Yahoo engineer manually included the site back in after reviewing my site. He did say a Yahoo engineer will look into it in the email.

I disagree that Yahoo brings no traffic/business. You and I may not use Yahoo to do our searches. But many users use Yahoo as their home page and use Yahoo Search Engine. Prior to the ban, it accounted for about 30-40% of my over all traffic. My site is and has been ranked in the top 5 also in Google and MSN. Google still brings the most traffic, but Yahoo is still a major player.

 

Ha! - You guys realise that this is a completly stock response right?

 

Jeremy, did the site in question have incoming or outgoing links? Weight or co-op ads?

Thanks!

 

Yes, but I have two other responses that were repsonse to the "stock" response, that were written by an actual human. The responses I received as much as spelled it out for me, quite directly.

 

It had outgoing links only. No incoming. No weight thrown at it. Just 5 outgoing random links.

 

Not good! I guess this means that you can put the coop on sites that are not really important –or- made for co-op and use the weight for sites that you care about.

 

Kinda defeats the purpose of the coop doesn't it? I mean I am still under the impression that the Coop was just that, a "coop" for "advertising". I actually do see incoming referrals from several of the sites on the coop that display ads for many of my sites. Most of my ads are "banners", not text. They are meant to attract visitors, not backlinks.

I think the only way to truely legitmize the coop is to have it be contextually based so that relevant sites show up on the sites that advertise the coop ads.

Of course this begs the question of how that would fit in with Googles TOS. Of course if the Coop remains FREE, then who can say that the contextual based delivery of advertising delivered via the coop on an AdSense enabled site is deemed as a "competive" service?

 

IMO the SE's shouldn't be penalizing sites for using coop. They should learn to ignore it just like they do for adwords and Y! ads. I've himmed and hawed about removing the coop, and keep coming back to a free speach issue. The coop is just a low-cost way of trading Ads. So because the cost is low, it means lots of people use it. It upsets the quotient of heavy advertising $ = deep pockets == important site, but hey, the inet is built from ingenuity. The SEs ought not to be banning anyone, but should learn to resolve the problem in their algorithms. Why should it matter if I pay $0.50 a click or $0.00 a click? We're all using each other's resources and there are costs there. Maybe Y! needs to pay the FreeBSD foundation for it's use of FreeBSD, G pay royalties for Linux, and MSN pay, uh, me? Evolution is what the net's all about.

 

Nice email there, thanks for posting

 

Then it should be possible to ban yahoo from yahoo or anyone elses site.

 

There is still no evidence that they are penalizing sites for using coop.