We’re currently performing an interesting experiment with Google Co-op. For one of our customers, NZ Holiday Houses, we have automatically created a subscribed link feed using the 1000 most popular search terms used on their site search. Each subscribed link shows the most popular pages on Holiday Houses for the given keyword.
We have added an invitation for people to join the Co-op on the search results page, e.g. Queenstown. We are testing the wording of the invitation to join the co-op. I couldn’t see any point in mentioning Co-op because I’m sure very few people outside the industry know what it is. I would be interested to hear suggestions from anyone on how to entice people to sign up to a Co-op.
The idea behind this is to allow people that are fans of this site to get easier access to the information. I’ve no idea whether it will catch on. It will be interesting to see how many subscribers we get.
We did find one problem with this after we released it. Google Co-op doesn’t work from google.co.nz. Most of the people who use this site regularly will be from New Zealand. Hopefully Google will fix this soon. In the meantime we can see whether we get any subscribers.
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The real problem is that they (Google co-op) don’t have any way to search the various subscribed links. I found that when I put up my subscribed links, I did not get into the directory in any way at all, even though one of the directories is called “latest.” Mine was pretty simple but I found owners with complex algorithmic subscribed links who didn’t get into the directory either.
I’m not sure it’s a win for anybody yet, although it might be a nice way to create links to internal pages.
Robbin