Leveraging "Powered by" and link spam
-
Hi all,
For reference: The SaaS guide to leveraging the "Powered By" tactic.
My product is an embeddable widget that customers place on their websites (see example referenced in link above). A lot of my customers have great domain authority (big brands, .gov's etc).
I would like to use a "Powered By" link on my widgets to create high quality backlinks.
My question is: if I have identical link text (on potentially hundreds) of widgets, will this look like link spam to Google?
If so, would setting the link text randomly on each widget to one of a few different phrases (to create some variation) avoid this?
Hope this makes sense, thanks in advance.
-
I'd defenitely recommend not to use keyword rich anchor text. Just use your brand name and diversify your link profile.
-
Dan,
Thanks for taking the time to respond to my question.
Your advice is sound. Matt certainly advises a nofollow however at the beginning he cautions against making widget links the primary source of link building in a strategy. At the end he says that links from widgets don't "carry the same weight" as links freely given.
As such, I wouldn't necessarily expect a blanket penalty for widget links. Rather than abandon widget links entirely I will instead apply a nofollow to all the links except a hand selected few on the very best domains (.govs and major brand / media sites).
Hopefully this approach will not raise any red flags (or black hats as the case may be).
Thanks again.
-
I would be very careful making embeddable widgets as an important facet of your link building campaign. This tactic used to work very well, but has been on Google's radar for some time now. In August of last year, Matt Cutts said the following: "I would recommend putting a nofollow, especially on widgets." The attached video of him discussing this may be helpful to you as you consider this tactic.
With regards to the anchor text, I would be VERY careful with it if you decide to proceed. I would personally recommend abandoning this tactic (unless there is a value outside of link building) and investing in high-quality content instead, but, if you do decide to proceed, I would build solely branded anchor text. This would be more defendable if a Google engineer ever flags the site. It won't look like you were trying to game the rankings on a keyword, but may still have a positive impact on the rankings. I would proceed with caution before doing that though.
Instead of putting the effort into a widget, I would put it into something that lives on your site (evergreen content) and provides a ton of value to end users. That will attract links and real users.
Hope this helps!
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
-
Are links still considered reciprocal if the link from one website is rel="nofollow" and the other isnt ?
Im working on a site that has some press coverage due in the next couple of days from quite a big site in the niche. The press outlet has requested that we link back to the content they post about us, they said the link can be rel="nofollow" if we'd prefer. Id really like to get the full benefit of the link back to our website, obviously if i did a straight link back to the 3rd party press site the links would be reciprocal and cancel each other out in terms of "link juice", but i was wandering if we make our link back to the 3rd party rel="nofollow" will we still get the full benefit of their link to us in terms of link juice ? ie. having the link back to them, but nofollow wouldn't been seen as a reciprocal link. ? (Obviously either way there is still benefit of having the link even if it reciprocal as it will send traffic to our site, but just no "link juice") Note - Ive used the phrase"Link Juice" for lack of a better term, any ideas on how else to refer to this ?
Technical SEO | | Sam-P1 -
Best use of robots.txt for "garbage" links from Joomla!
I recently started out on Seomoz and is trying to make some cleanup according to the campaign report i received. One of my biggest gripes is the point of "Dublicate Page Content". Right now im having over 200 pages with dublicate page content. Now.. This is triggerede because Seomoz have snagged up auto generated links from my site. My site has a "send to freind" feature, and every time someone wants to send a article or a product to a friend via email a pop-up appears. Now it seems like the pop-up pages has been snagged by the seomoz spider,however these pages is something i would never want to index in Google. So i just want to get rid of them. Now to my question I guess the best solution is to make a general rule via robots.txt, so that these pages is not indexed and considered by google at all. But, how do i do this? what should my syntax be? A lof of the links looks like this, but has different id numbers according to the product that is being send: http://mywebshop.dk/index.php?option=com_redshop&view=send_friend&pid=39&tmpl=component&Itemid=167 I guess i need a rule that grabs the following and makes google ignore links that contains this: view=send_friend
Technical SEO | | teleman0 -
How do you take down a link
Salut from Sunny wetherby UK 🙂 Having just watched a whiteboard fri clip all about the "Penguin Update" i want to know how to take down a link. I feel a site ive been working on has been pecked by the penguin. I did build inbound links on a specific commercial term and shiver me timbers is dropped oof the SERPS from top 5 to ziltch, yiles!! So my questiuon is please:
Technical SEO | | Nightwing
if you find an inbound link using a target term how do you kill it? Thanks in advance :_)0 -
Should I change these "Overly dynamic URLs" ?
Hello, My client have pages that look like this: www.domain.com/blog/index.aspx?blogmonth=1&blogday=10&blogyear=2012&blogid=256 Question 1: SEOMoz say they are overly dynamic. Is it really in this case as the numbers indicate the year, month and day and do not change? Question 2: Should we change the URLs to proper SEO friendly URLs such as www.domain.com/keywords1-keyword2? The pages are already ranking well and we worry that changing the URL may damage the ranking? Do we risk the page to go down in ranking by creating SEO friendly URLs? (and using a 301 to redirect from the old URL)
Technical SEO | | DavidSpivac0 -
Too Many On Page LInk
The analysis of my site is showing that I have a problem with too many on-page links. Most of this is due to our menu, and wanting users to be able to quickly get to the shopping category they are looking for. We end up with over 200 links in order to get the menu we want. How are other people dealing with a robust menu, but avoiding getting dinged for too many links? One of our pages in question is: http://www.milosport.com/category/2176-snowboards.aspx
Technical SEO | | dantheriver0 -
Google & async="true"
Hello, Any idea if Google (or Bing) parses/indexes content from scripts that are loaded using the async="true" attribute? In other words, is asynchronously loaded content indexable? Thank you.
Technical SEO | | phaistonian0 -
How do you stop Wordpress spam
What's the best way to stop Wordpress spam? We don't let comments go live without moderation, so the spammers don't succeed, however it wastes time going through the comments. A captcha code could work but a lot of software can crack it. Are there any good captcha solutions or could something else work better/in conjunction? Also, is there anywhere to report spam IP addresses? Not sure much happens when you mark a comment as spam in Wordpress.
Technical SEO | | giantpeach1 -
Correct 301 of domain inclusive "/"
Do I have to redirect "/" in the domain by default? My root domain is e.g. petra.at
Technical SEO | | petrakraft
--> I redirect via 301 to www.petra.at Do I have to do that with petra.at/ and www.petra.at/, too?0