Summary: Widgets are a good way to get mass links to your site.
- You need to use a html wrapper if your widget is written in a non-SEO friendly language
- Relevancy is key – make sure your widget is relevant to your link
So you’re looking for good quality links to your website and you understand that volume links have some value, as do carefully targeted links. So what methods can you use to get those volume links? Let’s look at widgets.
Starting with the technical stuff – a widget is a chunk of code that you can give people to drop onto their website, and that will perform some function without any further fuss. Widgets are commonly created in DHTML, Javascript or Flash.
Examples of widgets are clocks, page counters, countdowns to events, auction tickers, stock market tickers and daily weather reports. They can be used for anything where a publisher (like you) has info that they could stream onto someone else’s site without any intervention.
A problem with widgets is that they are written in languages like javascript so search engines can’t see the content (including any links back to your site). There’s a way of getting round this though – you can implement the widget with a HTML wrapper, so it includes a HTML text link, and hey presto, that’s the link back to your site.
If you create a good widget, there’s a lot of potential – good widgets are used by loads of sites, and can give a huge number of results.
However, you need to bear relevancy in mind. If your widget is placed on a website that has nothing to do with your site, Google will quickly detect the lack of relevance and your site may suffer as a result. A person once created a hit counter and linked back to their site (which did not sell hit counters!). The links provided with the hit counter were unrelated to the widget and in fact, hidden in the noscript part of the hit counter. The site lost all of its high rankings in Google as a result, and consequently most of its traffic.
So if you provide a widget, it does need to be relevant. For example, if you’re an SEO site, an SEO tool with a link back to your site (particularly a link back to, say, the help section on using that tool) would be acceptable. If you provide stock market information, a stock market ticker widget with a link back to your site (again preferably a help section on using the ticker) would be acceptable. Google has made it clear, however, that the use of widgets that are unrelated for link building is not acceptable – even if the link is perfectly visible. The reason is that if the link is not related to the widget, it is unlikely that the link is an endorsement of the page that it links to. The person using the widget merely wants to benefit from the widget itself. Google’s interest in links, however, is in links from people wanting to endorse the site (their vote).
In contrast, where there is a relationship between the widget’s function and the site being linked to, it’s likely that the endorsement of that site is intended, and that’s what Google wants to know about.
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