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Google Coop – what benefits does it have?

by Darren

If you’re a search engine marketer, then the first thought that comes to your mind about hearing a new product has been released from Google should be: how will the world and I benefit? One of this week’s barrage of new products is the Google Coop.

What is the Google Coop?? How the heck do I know? It’s yet another of the many obtuse web apps lovingly bestowed into Cyberspace by the strange troll-like engineers at the Google Labs

Like most of Google’s other web applications, you wouldn’t take a 5 second look at Google Coop if it wasn’t for the fact that Google made it. Let’s consult the words of Google to see what the purpose of the Coop is:

Google Co-op is about sharing expertise. You can contribute your expertise and benefit when others do the same. Help other users find information more easily by creating “subscribed links” for your services and labeling webpages around the topics you know best.

There you have it. It’s a stab at some sort of a reputation system, but it doesn’t really appear to be integrated into the total “Google Experience” in any meaningful way.

Next I clicked on the Google Coop Directory. There are 6 “topics” to choose from.

Okay, now let’s move on to Google Coop Subscribed links. These are bit more interesting, because you can custom craft and add links to Google. Here’s a good piece about implementing the links in Google. Since the user has to be logged into Google, these ads won’t really affect SEO work, but it might be worth it for you to customize your links, depending on how many subscribers you can attract. And therein lies the rub for me:

The main benefit appears to be to Google, by helping them grow out their logged in user base.

I’ll still experimenting with this, because it at least gives you extremely high profile links for logged in users. Depending on your market (if it’s tech savvy you’ll probably benefit), it could be well worth it and at a small cost of the learning curve. It’s fairly tech heavy, so not for all casual users, but it’s worth experimenting with.