Depending on the topic, Google Co-op may prove beneficial. Currently there are topics such as health, autos, computer and video games etc. The benefit for site owners is that if you are an authority on a certain service or product you can set up "subscribed links" for these services or products, and label web pages around the topics you know best. You can do this by adding a subscribed link feed and giving it a name while providing the destination URL.

Attaching Labels to Web Pages

Google Co-op is built upon the concept of labels. Google defines these labels as interesting categories of results within your topic. The example used to illustrate by Google was if you were a doctor with specific expertise in a particular disease, you can contribute by using the labels in that health topic to annotate all the web pages that you know, and provide useful, reliable information about your specialty. See where the relevancy comes in?

Getting back to the idea of attaching labels to web pages... Google describes this process as annotation, which is basically attaching a label to a webpage, website or set of web pages (specified by a URL pattern). From here, you can indicate that the associated web pages should be preferred in the search results for queries with that label. Through using Google Co-op a given search result can have zero or more labels associated with it. Your topic's search results page has a set of labels at the top to help users refine their queries easily. You can also direct your audience, and list who your particular labeled page is to be directed to (ie. students, advanced viewers, etc.). Other options include being able to label high-quality pages relevant to the topic.

Through the options available you can apply multiple labels to a single page. The key is to make sure that they are relevant as the overall goal is making information more discoverable for everyone. You can label a whole website or just individual pages by specifying one of the following patterns; the wildcard pattern (ie *.html), the prefix pattern (ie. www.yoursite.com/*) or the exact match pattern (ie. www,yoursite.com for the single URL of www.yoursite.com).

Benefit of Attaching Labels to Web pages

Google states the following:

"Users who subscribe to you will see your labels for relevant searches. As your labels become higher quality and more comprehensive, and as more users subscribe to you, your labels may start surfacing to more Google users than just those who explicitly subscribed. A number of factors help determine how broadly your labels appear -- such as the number of subscribers you have, how many websites you've labeled, and, most importantly, how often your labels make it easier for users to find what they're looking for."

If Google Co-op can help me find more relevant information that I am looking for when I do a query then I will "label" it a success, but until this happens, I will continue to seek relevant results from the various search engines.

For me, it's all about relevancy baby...

Jody Nimetz
Organic Search Strategist
Enquiro Full Service Search Engine Marketing

Tags: Google Internet

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