Ranking Experiment

I've been following the site in G UK, it had got up as far as 9, fell back to 11, went back up to 9, and is now down to 14.

 

I'm not sure in MSN is like G (different data centers) but I can find this site in MSN's top 100.

 

I think it's worth mentioning with Yahoo though, a zero content spash page doesn't have much hope.

 

Thats what I am thinking. Lack of content can cause a drop in both Yahoo and MSN. The experiment seems to be showing how much google values incoming links.

 

Google: 17
MSN: N/A
Yahoo: N/A

 

I will be curios to see how this turns out. I know from my own experience that my serps yo yoed lately with an influx weight.

I don’t see how having an option of adding links at a measured pace (20-100 a day) would affect the efficiency of the coop.

If the ads are only for advertising should we be using the rel="nofollow" attribute for hyperlinks?

 

If you took out the option to gain backlinks via the coop I'm pretty sure the popularity would decrease rapidly

 

I agree with this but Yahoo does not. I am convinced that Yahoo needs to change their stance on this matter. Is it fair that I can dump a wack of weight on my competition and get them banned from Yahoo? I agree that Yahoo does not represent the kind of traffic that Google does but it all adds up. It appears as though MSN is also taking some kind of corrective action now as well .

I wouldn't mind hearing from the master of the universe about this. This is exactly what has happened to my big domain at Yahoo...complete removal from SERPS but still showing bl's and indexed . What are your thoughts Shawn?

 

How about proceeding experiment by changing all the links to point to the main page with content of the same site (http://www.uccf.org/_webtest/default.htm) to avoid the splash? At least we would know for sure if the lack of the content is the problem.

 

That could be a good experiment to try. I also have another experiment in mind. I need a few volunteers who will be willing to direct some co-op weight at a certain site for me. I don't have a whole lot of weight. If you would like to help me with this just send me a PM.

 

Google: 18
MSN: 16
Yahoo: N/A

 

Yes I see that they are now at 15 in MSN.

 

Here's a chart with about a month and a half worth of tracked data.

 

Google: 17
Yahoo: N/A
MSN: N/A

 

Not good news at all...

 

The problem with this is "experiment" is that it had entirely too many variables.

How many backlinks did it have before? What was the affect of no on-page optimization? What about the fact that all new links had the exact same anchor text? What about the fact we were targeting a single word search term?, etc. etc. Just too many unknowns to rush to judgement on what this means. Certainly you should be careful.

The other thing we can't know is, did the site benefit in terms of how they measure success (i.e. visitors, donations, etc.)?

Finally, even if only measuring SE traffic, measuring SERP placement for "charity" is too narrow. On a hunch (based off some similar things I've seen on my own sites) I searched on the following on MSN:

Uganda Children
Uganda Charity
Charity Foundation
Uganda Foundation

Guess where the site ranks?

 

I'm sure there are people here (me included) that has pointed more than 10k weight at a website and not been dropped, likely to be some other reason for loss in msn and yahoo.

 

you guys are probably right. It's a PR5 site, so I naturally assumed it was a previously "ranked" site in MSN and Yahoo - at least in the top 100.

Shawn, just curious, digitalpoint.com was also dropped from Yahoo. It can't even be found with the search term "digital point". Do you know why? Many of us also assumed it was co-op because we know you had lot of weight pointing to it.