You competitors can see you're using the ad network!

Fryman, after your co-op associated sales and traffic are cut in half, I want to see you back here singing the praises of the co-op network and how it is really doing a great job of being the "advertising only" network that it is. If it was an advertising only network do you honestly think it would have HALF of the membership it does? Negative. People want to see SERPS improve, they want traffic, and they want $$$. Shawn has done a great job with the network, but I am sure people aren't joining for the very attractive text-link banner ads. =/

Shawn does a great job of publicly pretending that this isn't the purpose, but I don't have to because I don't run the network. These are the facts.

 

Projection

Defense mechanism. Projecting one’s undesirable feelings or behaviour onto someone else. A person may hate their sibling, and resolve this emotional conflict by deluding themselves into believing that it is the sibling who hates them. Someone may be abusive toward their spouse, yet believe that it is the spouse who is abusive, and their own reaction is simply defensive.
www.reasoned.org/glossary.htm

A defense mechanism, operating unconsciously, in which what is emotionally unacceptable in the self is unconsciously rejected and attributed (projected) to others, often the treating therapist.
www.bpdresourcecenter.org/what_glossary.htm

 

Minstrel's helped a lot more people around here than you have with your "witty" remarks. I may not always agree with him, but I can see where he has helped people.

But that aside, to the OP, the co-op is an advertising network. People can use it if they wish. If you have a problem with it, no one is forcing you to use it. You can SEO the old fashioned way. There are still some SEO purists out there.

Shawn isn't trying to hide the co-op network. No one is. If you did a refresh on any page running co-op ads, you'll notice that the links always change. Hmm, your competitors may find it odd that that happens, and likely will try and find the source, or this same network. We have 10,000 accounts, and probably tens of thousands more that are aware of the network. This network is no different than any web ring or what MS Bcentral (I believe) used to do way back when. It's an opt in service that can be opt'd out of. Call it whatever you want.

Also, have you read the patent released by Google? If not, I suggest you do. In it, they describe that links that have a short term life on a page typically do not benefit as much as a long term, static link. Google knows about the network. They are keen to many SEO communities. They're not dumb. They can easily kill the benefits of such network by slightly modifying their algo. It's not rocket science.

 

We're talking about a few characters of code. Chaning the ads.digitalpoint.com to a ip address. And it does serve a purpose, as someone has commented it will stop ad blocking code. I don't know how widespread that will be but if it helps network functionality...?

I wasn't aware of that and for doing it unwittingly I apologise.

 

Agreed. I haven't seen him say anything constructive

 

You 'forgot' about advertising that site you were bragging about makeing 1300 a month. You were thinking about selleing a 1300 a month site for 15K.

Both big mistakes.

What does that make you? Newbie in terms of simple business if you ask me. Also a complete newbie in online marketing. Who forgets about AdWords?

 

Very Nice. That's the best solution I've read !

It passes the relevant data - thereby ensuring members continue to benefit from stats, while handling disclosure as preferred.

I doubt the local server overhead would be a problem.

What do you think Shawn, is the mod something you'd condone ?

Cheers,

JL

 

Glad to see I'm not the only one who's noticed that Fryman has absolutely NOTHING useful to say. Most of his 1000+ posts are one-liners that add nothing whatsoever to the discussion and his favorite answer to any suggestions from the more intelligent users of the co-op is - if you don't like it LEAVE.

I would guess that the main problem here is that he simply doesn't understand the way the co-op code works. He has not offered any alternatives to the current stats tracking method because he doesn't really understand what's going on and wouldn't have a clue how to modify the code to achieve the desired results. I could be wrong, I don't know him, nor do I care to.

Fact is - there are many ways to do this, and Shawn is clearly aware of these (as he quite obviously *does* know how to code) He has chosen to implement the stats this way, we are just asking him to consider some alternative methods as the current method does make it VERY easy for the SEs to discount any benefit the co-op backlinks are providing it's participants now, whereas before it was *somewhat* less obvious - and this is one of the many appealing aspects of the co-op for myself and clearly for many others.

Fryman seems to believe that if you haven't posted thousands of worthless messages to this forum - you are a newbie and don't have any right to discuss anything here. He knows nothing about the people he is insulting and, as was previously suggested, some of those are extremely experienced webmasters, they are not particularly new to the co-op (and even if they are, that doesn't mean their opinion is worthless), they probably contribute considerably more 'weight' to the network than he does. They have probably had bad experiences with the SEs over the years, they may well have a large collection of websites under their control. This may well be their full-time job that they make a decent living off and understandably want to make sure that NOTHING jeopardizes that - now or in the future.

If, at the end of all this discussion, Shawn states that this is the way it works and it is NEVER going to change, then we are all free to decide if we want to continue using the network or not. We know that, he knows that - so STFU Fryman.

To suggest that this is ONLY an advertising network it somewhat of an insult to most peoples intelligence (Fryman clearly excluded). It is an advertising network that uses static text links that to the casual observer, just look like plain-old links. That's the BEAUTY of the network and I suspect one of the main reasons why it has grown so big so quickly.

Ad networks are nothing new, but an ad network that implements the links like this certainly IS. Everyone knows why it's so popular, so why pretend otherwise.

If it were purely an ad-network, it wouldn't be a very good one. No relevance (at the moment), and no click-thru stats. A pure ad-network would use tracking URLs that would provide it's users with a lot more useful tracking information - but this would give them no benefit whatsoever in the SERPs. Hmm, maybe that's why Shawn implemented it like this, what do you think?

Since joining the co-op I have had ZERO sales from people clicking on the ads, I suspect most of those clicks come from the owners of the sites displaying the ads. However, my rankings in MSN and Yahoo and sky-rocketed on several sites. #1 on MSN for an almost impossible key-phrase - resulting in thousands of extra visitors a day - all as a direct result of the HUGE number of backlinks with highly targeted and varied anchor-text.

I personally LOVE the co-op for this and cannot thank Shawn enough for coming up with such a great idea. However, it's not perfect, improvements can always be made, and this is WHY we 'newbies' are proposing alternatives to the existing code. We aren't complaining, we aren't saying the network sucks, we know we have a choice, we WANT to continue using the network, we also want to maximize the benefits it provides and at the same time we want it to continue in the direction it started in.

If tomorrow Shawn announced that all links would use the no-follow tag, or would use tracking URLs or anything that would remove the BL 'bonus', then that is entirely up to him. I would guess if that happened that a lot of people would leave and that someone else would implement a new network using the current method of linking. I certainly hope that will not happen and I doubt it ever would, because I'm sure Shawn enjoys those added benefits too, and that is probably what motivated him to implement the network like this in the first place (just a hunch - I'm not a mind-reader, but I can make an educated guess)

I respect Shawn's reluctance to openly state anything like this, he's a smart guy - as are many of the participants in the co-op.

So - Fryman - if you have nothing constructive to say, put a sock in it. Try to learn how to be civil to your fellow co-op members, as these are the very people that are providing YOU with thousands of backlinks that help to promote YOUR sites in the search-engines too.

If anyone has the right to tell people - that's the way it is - if you don't like it just leave, it is Shawn, an NO ONE else. Got it? Just because you are a no-life who likes to post worthless one-liners all day long, doesn't make you some sort of co-op guru - quite the opposite, it simply shows everyone what a geek you are. Get a life, get laid or something. I don't know what it is, but clearly you have some personal issues you need to address.

Man - that feels better....

 

hey! i am very happy with the adnetwork but it seems like the changes may cause problems. why dont you just leave everything the way it is or even dont give google the ability to filter the ads? i cant understand this...

 

The fact that it's free sets this one apart from the rest. 1. It's an Ad Network. 2. It's a useful one because it's FREE (no others with same reach + functionality are to my knowledge). 3. You get the bonus of link popularity transfer if the SE's decide to honour that.

 

Funny thing that seems to be sensationalized by all these guys is that you are going to go to # 1 in the SERP's in every keyword if you use this.

Well if I give you a link from a high PR page that might also give you a boost or if you buy a text link ad from a great page that might also give you a boost.

But since this is a barter of space/ads/text links instead of a purchase or a free link something is up and this needs to be hidden.

Funny that it is being advertised on ADWORDS everyday (Shawn is paying Google to advertise the co-op) but at the same time he should try to hide it because members think that by others finding out about it they will be hurt.

 

Don't believe everything you read.

Shawn has addressed this issue and the fact of the matter is that it has been improved.

Further to the point, it will continue to be improved!

Just because 2 or 3 people out of 10,000+ start posting about Google bans etc doesn't make it true.

Shawn himself in this thread has stated "If you are that worried about a ban, don't use it"

 

BAD IDEA ... why track? no one cares about seeing #'s ... we care about backlinks ... which will be zero once the network gets canned.

 

How is it "Going to get canned" if it is getting larger by the day, nothing stays the same in technology, it always changes, are you using the same software that you used 5 years ago

 

Don't put it as if your own opinion is ours as well.

Generalizing is silly.

 

don't be mad ... sorry for generalizing.

anthony ... ihope i'm wrong ... i jsut don't understand the need to broadcast "DIGITAL POINT".

 

Guys

I know a lot of people have been coming to the forum and just registering to post crap. Its very typical in the SEO world when someones idea goes well for lots of other SEOs to try to crap on it. And this is hurting the quality of discussion on this forum.

Anyways I like most normal people consider that google or other SEs could devalue coop links, or even penalize them. Its a valid concern, even if the network is created just for ads. I am not saying that SEs will, but is a possibilty.

At one point google did pr zero all the pages in the zues directories

http://www.google.com/search?num=10...en-US:official&q=zeus+themeindex+pr+0&spell=1

So its not unheard of

google didn't ban the sites, it just made the autogenerated pages pr0, which essentially made their outgoing links worthless.

 

I didn't read the whole thread, but IMO the image on the client side is a problem. The server side code should tell what ads you displayed not the client side. This new image will not tell if anyone clicked an add and therefore is a useless "tell" that SHOULD NOT be in there IMO.

Slice it anyway you want, but this is of no use on the client side since it don't/can't track clicks.

 

Ok, if the co-op is just an ad network, then no one would object if I changed the script to put the "nofollow" tag in the links generated, or in the header tags of the page containing the displaying the co-op links, and showed other members how to do same, to avoid even the remote possibily of any Google penalty (for showing auto-generated, unmoderated links unrelated to my sites' content).

Human visitors would still see all those links to co-op members' sites which, being unrelated to my site's content, are no commercial threat to me, now that Google wouldn't count them. And members would still get the value of all the clicks my sites generate. Which probably isn't much at the moment, as the links are at the bottom of each page, and largely unrelated, but hey, the co-op is still growing, so it could add up. Eventually.

 

better yet ... let's use Javascript links like all the other ad networks do.

i have difficulty trying to track the referrer from most of the campaigns i manage using server side "referral" tags ... it because it's linked via JS.