Are widgets dangerous after the Panda update?
-
My site provides widgets (online polls) which were developed so that each one would embed a do follow text link into the customers website.
With Panda's unnatural link algorithm now in place should I modify these links to be nofollow and give up on this strategy or alternatively just set the text as my sites domain name?
The only other option I could think of was to only embed links where the customers site had a certain page rank or above?
Any thoughts?
-
I wonder if it is actually wrong to generate backlinks in this way though? I know there was some guy who used the widgets to advertise unrelated products but that's not what I'm doing.
I had two, one one the front of the poll with our domain name, and a second with "Create your own free poll" on the results (displayed initially as a hidden div which appears once the vote button is hit)
Well I chickened out today and set both links to nofollow as the sites already ranked well before the polls were launched and I don't want to risk it.
I just wish there was some official guidance on this.
-
Been wondering about this myself. Did anyone who had a site that was otherwise clean get slammed by Penguin because of IBL's derived from widgets?
-
Just for the sake of clarity I think you mean the Penguin update.
And I would definitely recommend changing the anchor text to either your brand name/domain name.
You could only embed links when the site reaches a certain PR threshold and while this might help you against any algorithmic penalities/devaluations it must be pretty easy to spot on manual inspection.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
My site lost a lot of traffic in the lastest update - what to do?
Hi all, there seems to have been an algorithm update on February 7. One of my big sites www.poussette.com, lost about 25 % of its organic traffic afterwards and has not revovered yet. What are the best steps to take right now? It is 7 years old we continuously did conservative SEO (technical, link building, adding content). Thanks in advance. Dieter
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Storesco0 -
Google update this wknd or page title issue?
Hi, I've seen a big ranking drop for many major terms, for a particular site, just on Google. This happened Fri 20th or Sat 21st just gone. I don't see any news on an algorithm update over the weekend.I had changed many of the sites major page title protocols 2 weeks ago but a) I would have expected any negative effect before now and not all at once b) the protocols were carefully crafted to avoid traffic drops for major terms and c) i'm seeing traffic drops for keywords that still start at the beginning of the page title d) im seeing drops for some pages which are still using the OLD page titles. I had even tested the protocol on a number of pages in advance to ensure it wouldn't cause problems. As a bit of background - the title protocols were changed to make them more user friendly and less keyword heavy. CTR from search improved so was hoping for better not worse rankings! Ideas, gratefully appreciated.Andy
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AndyMacLean0 -
GWT Message - CMS Update Available
Howdy Moz, Just received a message in Google Webmaster Tools about a CMS update: "Joomla Update Available As of the last crawl of your website, you appear to be running Joomla 1.5. One or more of the URLs found were: http://www.website/custom-url/article5034 Google recommends that you update to the latest release. Older or unpatched software may be vulnerable to hacking or malware that can hurt your users. To download the latest release, visit the Joomla download page. If you have already updated to the latest version of Joomla, please disregard this message. If you have any additional questions about why you are receiving this message, Google has provided more background information in a blog post about this subject." Read through the associated blog post. According to the post a generator meta tag is created in Joomla that notes the CMS version. Here's the oddity: The site was on Joomla 1.5 over 2 years ago. 1 Year ago it was updated to Joomla 2.5. About a week ago it was converted completely to Wordpress. According to GWT the last date the Google bot accessed the site was the day before (5/1/14) the email. I went through the code, css/html, and the database and found no reference of Joomla 1.5. Has anyone seen this message? If so, how did you rectify it? Were there any adverse effects on rankings?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AaronHenry0 -
Updated Wordpress version and installed SEO plugin, ranking went down
Last week, we updated our Wordpress version to the most recent version, and installed the SEO plugin. Our rankings immediately went down from #9 to #19. Is this normal? Will our rankings improve once the search engines crawl our site in the next couple weeks? Any feedback is helpful!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | safiaabbasi0 -
Is it dangerous to use "Fetch as Google" too much in Webmaster Tools?
I saw some people freaking out about this on some forums and thought I would ask. Are you aware of there being any downside to use "Fetch as Google" often? Is it a bad thing to do when you create a new page or blog post, for example?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BlueLinkERP0 -
Penguin & Panda: Geographic Penalities?
Has anyone ever come across information about a website appearing strongly in SERP's in one region, but poorly in another? (ie: great in Europe, not so great in N. America) If so, perhaps it is a Panda or Penguin issue?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Prospector-Plastics0 -
Duplicate Content - Panda Question
Question: Will duplicate informational content at the bottom of indexed pages violate the panda update? **Total Page Ratio: ** 1/50 of total pages will have duplicate content at the bottom off the page. For example...on 20 pages in 50 different instances there would be common information on the bottom of a page. (On a total of 1000 pages). Basically I just wanted to add informational data to help clients get a broader perspective on making a decision regarding "specific and unique" information that will be at the top of the page. Content ratio per page? : What percentage of duplicate content is allowed per page before you are dinged or penalized. Thank you, Utah Tiger
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Boodreaux0 -
Panda Prevention Plan (PPP)
Hi SEOMOzers, I'm planning to prepare Panda deployment, by creating a check-list from thinks to do in SEO to prevent mass trafic pert. I would like to spread these ideas with SEOMoz community and SEOMoz staff in order to build help ressources for other marketers. Here are some ideas for content website : the main one is to block duplicate content (robots.txt, noindex tag, according to the different canonical case) same issue on very low quality content (questions / answers, forums), by inserting canonical redirect or noindex on threads with few answers
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Palbertus1