Today I started a hot discussion at Sphinn about how certain sites are getting millions of links from the Digital Point Coop. This is something that Google knows about and yet some sites with 24 million + links are still ranking for some major terms such as loans, mortgages and credit cards.
Now for those of you not familiar with the Coop it is a way for you to run 4 or 5 auto generated links in the footer of your website. One of the problems with the network is that most of the sites that run it are “donor sites” which are full of thousands of pages of useless content that only exist so that companies can run Coop ads on them.
The actual sites that benefit are clean sites that don’t sell links and don’t host Coop ads themselves so Google usually leaves them alone and lets them keep top rankings.
What should Google do?
Todays poll is asking you the question, what should Google do about this?
Patrick Altoft is Director of Search at Leeds based digital & SEO agency Branded3. Patrick also runs Blogstorm.You can get our blog posts delivered for free by email every day - simply add your email address to the box below or alternatively grab the RSS feed.
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In the spring of 2006, we found the co-op and had TREMENDOUS success with it. As with most things too good to be true, though, that was short-lived. That summer both Google and Yahoo (Yahoo?!) brought the hammer down. Google just removed value from the links (since there was an obvious signature that they could use to detect them) and Yahoo eliminated the participating sites from the results altogether. Ever since then, we’ve ignored the co-op.
Are you seeing co-op links passing weight again?
I don’t have a problem with it – Unless it’s a CLEAR violation of google’s TOS. If they are right at the line without tipping over, well kudos to them for figuring out how far to push google. However if they are clearly violating the terms of service then it’s going to come back to bite them in the rear because google always finds out eventually.
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The Coop is a link scheme and this is against the guidelines as far as I can see.
More comments from Patrick AltoftThe co-op isn’t advertised as a way to get page rank. Since the links usually always change, I don’t see the harm. The co-op is more of an advertising network to get unique visitors, not page rank. That’s my understanding of it anyway..
I would hope it would only get the weight removed, and not a penalty.
Can you imagine how easy it would be to totally destroy competition if sites were getting penalized for it? It would be like a three way link exchange of death!
you can’t ban the sites that run the ads.
you just remove the PR, essentially their ability to vote.
this removes the market value and the network will die.
kinda funny really because I reckon the DP co-op was under the radar till they updated and started showing DG pixels.
worst move ever!
for the record I don’t go in for the DP co-op bashing like above, if you’re getting beaten by them don’t go crying to everyone * Google…. either
play dirty too
work hard
or sit and wait.
Now I understand how I went from PR4 to PR0
I agree totally with you Gerbot; Patrick is very bitter about the DP CooP.
Its case of “God if you cant make me slim, please make all my friends fat”
funny!
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