Google Co-Op is one of the latest products released by google in the last weeks

• What Google Co-Op is
• Google Co-Op search experience for the user
• Implementation of Google Co-Op

• More details and further reading for Google Co-Op

So Google lets webmasters annotate and categorize the pages on their web sites. But hey – also other people can tag and annotate your web pages… this is not a webmaster-only feature like the sitemaps.

This is another step into the direction of social software, using the concepts of social bookmarking services like Digg or del.icio.us to enhance the search engine results.

Google Co-Op practical use for marketing?

Google Co-Op is a feature that allows YOU to bring your products, service and web sites in front of million users at the premium spots where top Google adwords are booked.

This is bound to a few implications and restrications that I will explain a bit right now.

Fact – at the moment it only works with a subscription.

This means

1) you have to create categories and labels for pages of your site and give them to Google.

2) Then your users have to “subscribe” to your co-op profile to

3) see the search results including (possibly) your pages using your categories and labeling finally

This means Google Co-Op works only IF, and only IF your clients and potential clients will trust you and subscribe to your profile.

What the Google Co-Op user will see

[img_assist|fid=6|thumb=1|alt=Search results with Google-Co-Op enabled|caption=Search result for the keyword “drupal” with Google Co-Op enabled for technology http://weblog.cemper.com enabled. The above green box links with the free premium result directly to the Good reasons for drupal #2 weblog post

Live example for Google CoOp

Now you can test this very easily by

1. clicking to the Google Co-Op Profile I created for myself
2. then subscribing to it (you can reverse that a second later if you wish

1. then searching for Drupal in Google

do you see it?!? :-)

Upload service links with the Subscribed Links API of Google Co-Op

The Google Subscribed Links API is the API I used for above sample screenshot. With it you can add your services directly into Google search.

The link above leads you to a pretty straightforward API description where they explain how to generate such service links.

Great tool – implementing RSS for Google Co-Op

I found this great RSStoCoop Converter beta today !

It allows you to upload an RSS xml file

and returns you a fine Google Coop file.

(note that this site currently displays a bandwidth exceeded error :-)
I would love to mirror that tool …

Then you just upload that file to Google subscribed links map and a few minutes later when crawling is finished, you’re done !

From first testing I found some bugs, e.g. my project management weblog wasn’t converted properly

but anyway, a great start!

PHP Codesample for uploading service links to Google CoOp

Pierre, the author of the RSS2coop conversion tool above has a similar goodie – a PHP code sample on how to provide a huge list of subscribed links (maximum 1000 currently) to Google – based on some MySql data you have in a database

You can find the code on his weblog as well (as soon as he has bandwidth again)

Ok – now for the more advanced topics

Adding page tags (annotations) to existing topics (contexts) in Google CoOp

You can annotate web pages for Coop just as you tag pages in del.icio.us and other social bookmarking services.

For that you just need to upload an XML or tab separated file exported from an excel sheet… Google has a small tutorial about that adding to existing topics like Health, Travel, etc

Implementing own labels and topics for Google Co-Op

Very interesting is the fact, that you can actually create your own taxonomy – made up by labels in Google Coop – which is essentially the same as the tags in del.icio.us and other social bookmarking services.

So if you are an industry expert in your field, Google asks you to tag the web for them to improve search quality :-)

Google provides a detailled description on creating a CoOp labels and topics

Creating Coop labels

For creating labels (the tags in del.icio.us) they even provide naming-conventions to use thruout the XML file – so hard-to-catch aspects in search like the target audience, the source type (i.e. government or cooperations) can be labelled (tagged)

Creating topics and search triggers

For creating and labelling search triggers they have a pretty complex syntax that allows you to define search events on a meta data model level.

For instance you can define that Earth, Mars and Venus are planets.

Then you can define query triggers for the following schemes


planet [Planet]
learn about [Planet]
teach about [Planet]
learn about planet [Planet]
teach about planet [Planet]
[Planet] rover
[Planet] missions
[Planet] mission facts


while [Planet] is replaced by Earth, Mars, Venus each time, giving you a total of 8 × 3 triggers … of course if you add all the planets in this sample you are going to save even more specification time…

More details and further reading for Google CoOp (beta)

Google Co-Op mandatory for health and travel

Google already subscribes every Co-Op user to the experts in health and travel – obviously to improve the search results for those markets. Both have a lot of high margin keywords and I wonder why they didn’t add Financial products and services (yet) ?

Update 6/1: people already noticed different serps for pharma products

Google Co-Op supported well by Google

Google engineers even started answering all sorts of detailed technical questions on Co-Op in the Google Co-Op group , for example on

• How Google Co-Op Labels Work
• How Co-Op contexts and topics are associated

• ... and even already a Google Co-Op FAQ

Google Co-Op commented on the web

• Google Co-Op – The beginning of the end for the search algorithm?

• Digg and Coop now live

you can now also subscribe to the Digg profile and add those Digg links to your vertical Google results as well … cool

• Matt Cutts wants to build a spam blacklist with Google Co-Op

Google Co-Op outlook

I am expecting a lot of new and innovative ideas and aspects to use in search marketing from this innovation… just like a lot of plugins for generating Google sitemaps were developed, the CMS systems will deliver additional meta-data export tools – and people started implementing or designing already – just like the Drupal-Community

This is yet another feature that sets Google apart from it’s competitors, as a true interactive and community based approach was started…

This feature (let’s call it methodolody)outbeats so many other currently launched products lik Google Pages, Google Trends and that funny little Google Notebook tool…

Keep an eye on it! I’m keen to see this develop… and expect some future posts about this soon…