Widgets, SEO, and Google's Opinion

I watched this for the last few months as it developed. A web developer working for SEOMoz left to go work with a younger start up company, a free dating site called JustSayHi. He posted on the Moz blog about his link building technique, which was essentially to create widgets that were quizzes. A user would then peel off some HTML code that they could paste on their site that was their quizz score. His topics were a wide range of things like, 'How many 5 year olds could you take on in a fight' or 'How well could you survive a zombie attack'. His successful campaigns resulted in great rankings for the very competitive terms, 'free online dating' and 'online dating'.

The dating site was owned by a larger company which owned a network of other sites. They liked his link building success and asked him to do the same for a number of their other sites, namely payday loan sites and education sites. He added links to those sites into his widgets off the dating site. Google took notice and JustSayHi was penalized. After unsuccessful and not completely truthful reinclusion requests to Google and personal emails to Matt Cutts, they simply decided to scrap the old domain and start fresh with a new domain.

He continued his same strategy with the new dating site, OnePlusYou, similar widgets, linking back to OnePlusYou using terms like 'online dating'. Low and behold, out of the blue they got a note from Google basically saying, 'Watch yourselves, you are creating off topic links and this is considered gaming the system'.

All this bring us to this latest blog post on SEOMoz which summarizes in more detail what I just described. All this is notable for 2 things:

• If you spread your tactics out there for all to read on a site like SEOMoz, you will be noticed
• Matt Cutts is very clear in his comments what is acceptable for widgets, keep everything on the topic related to your site and make it worthwile for users
  

Matt's comments:

"Our reconsideration request was truthful but not as forthcoming as it might have been."

I'll
just highlight this point. If your reconsideration request gets a
personal reply from me, it's safe to assume that I'm paying close
attention to that situation. If that's the case, I recommend being very
careful to be clear when communicating.

A reconsideration
request that is technically true but leaves out what we consider to be
vital details comes across to us as "Maybe they don't know about these
other domains, so let's not mention them." That's why we recommend to
provide as much information as possible when requesting
reconsideration.

And:

Jeremy, I'll try to post on
that at some point, but clearly some widgets are less helpful than
others. When you wrote about this back in January:
http://www.xuru.com/linkbait-gone-spam/ , I think you made a pretty
good point that "Find Ultrasound technician schools
near you" with the link going to
http://www.medical-assistant-training-schools.org/ultrasounddiagnosticschools.htm
is not that helpful, and that a zombie apocalypse widget has very to do
with payday loans. If you were trying to promote your ultrasound
technician school, you probably wouldn't think it was fair if a
competing site ranked highly only on the basis of widgets.

And
Loren at
http://www.searchenginejournal.com/google-loves-transparent-links-hit-counter-spam/5615/
made another really good point when he called up people that had
installed widgets and asked them if they knew that they were linking in
such a way. One person replied "I had no idea - I looked for a free
counter and placed it on the site - how did you find out that it linked
to jerks?… I have removed the counter from my site including (I hope)
all the html they provided to paste on my site for the counter, thank
you for pointing this out."

Final note, I suppose that JustSayHi might not have had a better option that to simply start over. Though I would expect that Google would have simply devalued those widget links, they obviously took a harder look in this instance. What is a site owner to do? It's not like you could go out there and shut off all those widgets that you have out there in the wild. If Google is truely penalizing you in part for those, you can't make them go away.