Digital Point's Coop Ad Network
Digital Point's Coop Advertising network is really nothing more
than a large automated link exchange. Originally it was supposed
to be an automated link exchange for webmaster forums running
vBulletin software. How it works is you load code on your pages
which shows links to other sites, and then those sites load code
that shows links to your site. Its all done server side, all
random, so to a visitor or search engine it looks like a hard
coded link on your website.
Digital Point approached me about being one of the inaugural
members way back when. They explained the way it'd work is that
ads would only show on the vbulletin pages for viewing a single
post by itself.. Since viewers rarely if ever view such pages
you wouldn't be showing yet another ad to the viewers, but
search engines do view such pages and so everyone would get the
benefit of additional backlinks.
The code assigns weight based on things like traffic and Google
PageRank, you can also get weight from referring people. The
higher your weight the more often your ad will be shown. Also,
unlike a standard link exchange, the site you put the links on
does not have to be the same site you promote with your links.
This is an ingenious idea and does make the network more useful
than had it been a standard exchange.
I signed up (it was and is free after all) and it worked well
at first with the small group of less than 10 webmaster forums,
however the network was then opened up to more or less any site
running PHP. Imagine my surprise when checking my backlinks I
saw links from places such as a fishing site. What does website
publishing have to do with fishing? Nothing, so I took the ads
down, and lost a few thousand unrelated backlinks.
We all have our own limits and definitions of what is black hat
and what isn't, and this is one of those things where you'll
have to decide for yourself. I personally would not run this on
any site where a Google ban would seriously hurt me. However,
Google has been erratic lately, some sites simply do not rank
well no matter what you do. In these cases you might as well
join the ad network as it's not like it'll hurt you in Google
and ad network sites do quite well in Yahoo and MSN, even Google
sometimes.
Yes, make no mistake about it, using this network you can
easily get thousands of links pointing to your website, and that
is going to help you. However TrafficPower, the infamous SEO
company, did something similar with their client's web pages and
every single one of them was banned from Google eventually. I
believe their system was javascript based and so easier to
detect, but Google has a lot of smart guys working for them and
I'm sure they will be able to build an algorithm to detect and
ban sites using this system. Due to all of the above, my advice
is to use this network at your own risk. I've seen some amazing
results produced with this ad network, but in many ways it reeks
of spam, so you will have to decide if a Google ban is worth the
risk.