The value of Widgets for SEO

Marcoose · Jul 7, 2012

I run a forex website and am thinking about investing into the development of some widgets that people can use on their websites.

Does anyone out there have any experience of doing this. Are the SEO benefits there to be had? Is it possible to mbed text into the code and if so, how would that compare to a standard text link and is it considered by Google to white hat?

Thanks in advance!

M

Blossom · Jul 8, 2012

I've done it with a cookie control widget. Yup you can get a text link in there - my developer did it but don't know the details. You can create it using JavaScript though and that way they have to know about editing to remove the link - alternatively you could probably do something a bit snazzier and stop it working if they remove the link.

I assume it's white hat because it's no different to template creators requiring a link back when you use their template.

namdas · Jul 8, 2012

If the link is written in javascript rather than plain html it is unlikely it will be counted by Google - likewise links inside an iframe. I think you generally have to accept that some people will remove the credit link but most people won't bother.

One thing I would caution is to go easy on anchor text - use your brand name or similar as sitewide links are pretty much poison at the moment and if your widget is a calculator or similar that someone might put in their sidebar you could end up with an unhealthy amount of links that look sponsored - even if they weren't.

Marcoose · Jul 9, 2012

Thanks for the feedback peeps. Im going to get something done up in HTML
and have the anchor as a plain URL. Keep it coming if there's anything you can add.

Aegean · Jul 9, 2012

Marcoose said:
I run a forex website and am thinking about investing into the development of some widgets that people can use on their websites.

Does anyone out there have any experience of doing this. Are the SEO benefits there to be had? Is it possible to mbed text into the code and if so, how would that compare to a standard text link and is it considered by Google to white hat?

Thanks in advance!

M

I'm maybe reading this wrong but if you develop the widgets properly, you can program them to insert any selected data into a predefined area.

For example, if you look on my site cottage-property .co.uk , those blocks on the right are all optimised widgets. Some of them display articles from selected categories, another writes links to a predefined number of recent articles, other widgets contain external links and others contain adsense code.

Basically I can insert any html into the widget, tell it which pages or sections to display on, and it writes those codelines into the generated page as clean code, which google loves. In this way I can have constant content rotation, constant page updates on every oage, and control sitewide sets of links from one place.

I hope thats of help.

seemly · Jul 9, 2012

Blossom said:
I've done it with a cookie control widget. Yup you can get a text link in there - my developer did it but don't know the details. You can create it using JavaScript though and that way they have to know about editing to remove the link - alternatively you could probably do something a bit snazzier and stop it working if they remove the link.

I assume it's white hat because it's no different to template creators requiring a link back when you use their template.

Do search engine bots pick up/register javascript generated content (read: links) these days?

Nooby question I know, but it seems to me that a search engine would favour/provide more authority to links that are visible on page load (static), rather than non-existent if javascript is/was disabled (dynamic)?