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I've been using the coop since it's inception, and overall I've been real happy with it. I removed it from my main site about 4-5 months ago, as the links just looked out of place on a professional website (links to ladies lingerie? I think not).
But I left it on my other sites, and was using that weight to drive traffic to my main site. And that was working great until Google started "losing" pages from it's index, and my sites that were in the coop went from 12K pages indexed to 4.
I've spent the last month believing that it's due to a glitch in Google, as there are MANY webmasters in the same boat. At this point, my weight in the coop is non-existant, since I no longer have any indexed pages, so I removed the coop from the site. I'm now waiting to see if the pages will get reindexed. If so, there may indeed be some sort of penalty being given to sites running the coop.
I'll keep you all posted. I'm hoping that it's not coop related, because my weight was causing all my important terms to rank well in MSN, which was brininging me a surprising amount of business (while Google has left me high and dry since last October).
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