17.000 coop weight to (dis)proof Google Bowling

Thanks to Jlknauff's topic, I think it's about time to have a little experiment...

I have about 17.000 coop weight to play around with and suggest an experiment. I would do it to one of my own sites, but have no sites that meet underneath requirements.

A) You should own the website
B) website should be 1+ years old
C) website should have decent rankings in Google at the moment
D) no active link exchanges during period of experiment
E) no major updates to the site during period of experiment

The coop weight will be pointed at the homepage with 2 different anchor texts, equally spread. One will contain keywords for which the sites actually wants to rank for and the other will be something totally unrelated.

The coop weight will be pointed to the website for 3 months and rankings for both keywords will be tracked from starting date till 6 months after beginning of experiment. Tracking will be recorded through DP's keyword tracker for all 3 engines, Google/Yahoo/MSN. For both rankings and number of backlinks recorded by the SE's.

If you are willing to give it a try and your site meets all requirements, please post it here as everything should be visable to all who are interested.

I know of some other experiments trying to basically do the same thing, but I would like to test it anyway. For the people who ask why, the reason is why not. I am not actively using the coop weight and the sites displaying them are only to play around with, and this, to me, feels like an interesting experiment to play with!

I'll give you a site to try it on. The terms it ranks for aren't that popular, but I've got a page 1 ranking for:
- "user focused": 62 million results
- "user focused web design": 99 million results.
That should suffice for the experiment. This site has never done any type of link campaign and is over 4 years old. The site is www dot 4DiSolutions dot com.

Ah yes, a true gentleman :-)

My bet is that the site gets bowled into oblivion. I think jagger has one big flaw.... IBL spikes without proving who the responsible party is.

/*tom*/

Brandall: thank you for opening up your website to this experiment, much appreciated!

It looks like the perfect candidate for the experiment and have just registered your urls/keywords. When they are accepted, I will post the opening rankings.

Thanks again!

It'll be interesting to see what happens. My money is on nothing.

Links just went live on 06dec05!

Here are some details and opening rankings. As you can see the second keyword has the opposite meaning of the relevant one.






As the tracker doesn't show the MSN links, here it is manually: 26



Stats will be updated every week or so in this thread.

Can hardly wait for the results!

Well, I checked today and I've moved from #6 out of 62 million results for "user focused' (no quotes) to #4 out of 153 million results for the same phrase.

Google has clearly done something with their index. I'm seeing increases of 2 - 3 fold in number of results on almost ever search phrase.

Anyway, I'm liking this Google Bowling thing so far If I get to number 1, maybe we can try the same experiment with one of my ecommerce sites that actually rely on SE traffic ;)

LOL, that would be the second part of the experiment.

If we can do 2 experiments with the same outset, one for a none competive keyword phrase(this one) and another for a competitive phrase we would (almost) know for sure if it's possible or not.

Because Google applies the sandbox only to competitive/money keywords, they may have different other filters for competitive-none competitive keywords in place as well. So yes, there will be another experiment like this done with some sort of ecommerce website, I just hope one of my sites meets the requirments after 6 months!

The only problem is that co-op gives backlinks that change on refresh (most of them) so your link is never a hard link and thus never really matures. I predict nothing happens. I used co-op for a long time and never saw any results in Google.

Now LV, that'd be a good test.

I think the test is more to see if you can harm a competitor with backlinks (per the thread title anyway.)

I predict a nothing happens in Google, ban in Yahoo, #1 in MSN (and maybe AOL )

The problem with this test is that it's on an older domain. I've seen large sitewides do plenty of damage to a site I have that was only 8 months old with under a thousand backlinks. As soon as I removed the links the site recovered - no other changes.

I expect an older domain would whether it better, but the evidence and stories I've seen seem to point to Google bowling working quite well for burying newer sites.

Nods Devil.

But what person would want to "bowl" an 8 month old site, not even out of SB? I think the test on an older domain is grand, since that's where people would most want to bowl a competitor, as well as when it would hurt the most.

with a nerf ball...

DP and LV are harmless. If you really want to "bowl", you need to use far more nefarious linking schemes - aka: guestbook, referral, trackback, and comment spam.

A strong combination of all 4 of those, especially with anchor text like "buy viagra", will get bowled in no time.

Even if they're trying to rank for things other than "buy viagra"?

Interesting

This should prove interesting