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May 26th, 2006 
QuadsZilla Danny Sullivan points out that the improved results in Google’s pharma SERPs are/maybe from Google Co-Op.
After reading through google Co-Op, it’s clear they made this an uber-geeks only club. From the Google Co-Op API page:
The API was designed to be as easy to use as possible . . .
They then goes on to describe in 4,822 words the exact formatting and submission requirements without giving you a Tool to actually created the required XML files!
One guy created a tool to convert RSS feeds to the Google Co-op XML, but it’s a hosted app.
So you have to
1. Input you’re RSS feeds as they update
2. Convert them with the tool
3. Post the XML to a website and
4. Add the link to subscribed links.
Plus, it’s not a perfect fit unless you specifically design your RSS Feeds to match what the right input would be for Google. Right now, you are allowed to use up to 100 files containing a total of at most 10 MB of XML data in your Subscribed Links.
What is needed is a button in the google toolbar that takes you to a submit page similar to what delicious has for saving and submitting the xml to a Google server. But that would dramatically increase the volume of submission and likely decrease the quality of results. So don’t expect that any time soon.
It seems clear to me that Google intentionally made this difficult so they would only have an uber geeky, small, euthuastic group of editors that could be easily policed and monitored. They probaly have a staff of people at google creating what ammounts to hand picked SERPs. The Co-Op portion of it is for people with the technical skills and fervor to jump through daunting hoops for the thrill of working at Google for free. Google can then easily hand-pick the editors they want to trust and simply ignore the results of the rest of the group. It’s actually a pretty damn good idea.
All that being said, there really is only one important question: Will it work or is it already working to improve their SERPs?
My magic 8 ball says “All Signs Point to Yes.”
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Yes, it certainly is cleaned up a bit… but try placing some adjectives in front of your pill of choice.
i.e., search on “cheap cialis” or even “cheap viagra” for that matter…looks as familiar as ever!
I’ve nerver heard of Google Co-Op. As far as I have understand this, the user has to manually add you to his personalized search. Or am I getting something wrong here?
As for hand coding their results… I’ve noticed a few odd occurence lately… mainly websites receiving TOP spot in google for under-the-radar-but-well-paying keywords with ABSOLUTELY NO LINKS.
Not only was the page obviously spam (just a doorway loaded with keywords) but it showed 0 links on msn for the TLD and the individual page…
How on earth could this be possible? No PR, not an old page (it was a new free porn hosting company from the TLD) and absolutely no links and it’s still getting TOP spot in Google for it? Whatever the guy did is a genius, he was holding about 6 of the 10 places for “home owner insurance quotes” of every state for about a week there…
Any idea how this could be possible UNLESS he was working at Google? Get back to me by email if possible or leave a comment here, I’m really curious about this… I can remember the TLD if you’re interested…
I wrote a slightly different php script you can try.
Go to http://www.google.com/coop/manage/subscribedlinks,
and submit a link like this:
http://www.seo4fun.com/php/rss-parser.php?url=YOURRSSFEEDURL
e.g.
http://www.seo4fun.com/php/rss-parser.php?url=http://www.blog.com/blog/feed/
Note: Your feed has to be RSS 2.0; I only had time to write one regexp. Also, I won’t guarantee I won’t move the script; if I do and if someone likes the script I’ll post the source somewhere. The parser isn’t perfect, so it may choke on a post or two. You can check the XML by loading up your url in your browser.
You don’t need to download or upload anything. And it refreshes itself, so if you publish a new post, it will show up after a few hours in the Onebox when Google repings your feed. Last thing, your post will show up for categoires you published your post under.
If I could just figure out how to pull archived feeds and create database objects for categories, a script like this could cover alot of queries if you have a big blog. For small blogs its still fun but not productive.
Hi,
I’m the author of the “RSS to Co-op” online application, now you can download it at
http://www.seo-search.net/rsstocoopdev/
Regards,
Pierre