In yesterday’s session about Google CoOp, which is actually the two products Google Subscribed Links and Google Topics Sashi Seth, the lead product manager for Google Coop gave some useful tips on improving the Google subscribed links for you

4 recommendations for good Google subscribed links

1. make sure your information is not stale
2. target precisely – the better target your keyword triggers, the better will be the user experience, hence click-thrus
3. make your links actionable – when they lead to an action, ensure users get to that action in the next

1. make your links pleasing to read – you have not much control on the UI how Google displays them, but yet try to ensure decent experience

Note: for the keyword triggers that means, that you need to provide ALL the keywords, keyword synonyms and possible typos as triggers, as Google currently does not perform any qery expansion mechanism on the results.

You know what, I’d say these are generic tips that apply to ANY kind of optimization – be it link-wise, for PPC ads or in this case subscribed links again, which are in fact again links people should click on.

Your Bonus tip:

WHY should I optimize my subscribed links?

Google is analyzing user behaviour on them and on Choosing Providers for the directory, ranking in attributions in the SERPs you want to look good there…

the COOP Quality algorithm is fed by

• no of subscriber
• no of clicks on topics / links

• no of searches of each user

all that behavioural data goes into one “trust” value for that entity providing the links (that’s YOU, man!)

Interesting: even if the user did NOT subscribe to your links (which is mandatory usually to display them to the user) he MIGHT see them – and Google will measure the results and user-behaviour and increase the usage of your links worldwide, even if people did NOT subscribe…

Abuse? well, they say it’s a Self-regulating system – users that appreciate the value and editorial work will help you rank because they click thru and improve your trust and quality score.

How?

• link providers have to PROOF that their content is valuable
• that PROOF is created by users’ behaviour

• the user’s behaviour is weighting the ranking of the provided topic labels or links

My speculation:

These human generated authority signals are perfect to use and calculate a trust ranking also for organic websearch results, independent from the currently used search query.

AND SO, the authority you can gain via COOP links could multiple to search results of Organic, News, Images, Videos…

Attention: if only a few number of your links are clicked (low CTR) this will result in a negative ranking signal in Google CoOp, PLUS decreases your authority value! This might open the door for some “COOP”-bowling once it’s established enough

Some numbers

Google said, they have some

• 10,000s of people that are new subscribers DAILY

• 100s of new subscribed link submissions DAILY

nice traffic, eh?

Outlook:

What we need is a feedback loop to the provider/labeller so that he finds out if his work was successful.

So How do I find out if the coop link quality I provide is great ?

There are no tools available today, but Google is working hard on tools to provide those measurements for the near future!

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