Hello again, Mozzers! Ready for another article from the World’s Greatest SEO? Of course you are!
One of the SEO-related topics that has received quite a bit of attention lately is widget bait. Matt Cutts discussed it at SMX Advanced, and he also answered questions about it in a recent interview with Eric Enge, intuitively titled Matt Cutts Interviewed by Eric Enge. If you haven’t read that interview, I suggest you do so. Based on that interview, I have written out a brief set of guidelines for anyone who distributes widgets or is considering distributing a widget. Also, SEO specialist Brent Payne did a nice little write-up of this interview, called Matt Cutts Translated: 8 SEO Tips I Heard Him Tell Eric Enge, where he covers all the topics in the interview–not just widget bait.
Keep in mind that this is my own personal interpretation of the responses that Matt Cutts provided in that interview. So if I misinterpreted something and you take it as factual information and you make changes to your site, based on what I’ve said, and those changes cause Google to banish your site from its index and deport you from your country, then don’t come crying to ME about it. Unless your tears are made out of diamonds–in which case you can cry into my pocket. Unless I’m naked–in which case you can cry into my cupped hands. Unless I’m cupping my hands over my genitalia and yelling, “Get the f#@& out of here, I’m naked!”–in which case please come back later.
For those of you who don’t know what a widget is, it’s basically some kind of simple feature that you can add to your site, usually by just copying a piece of code from someone else’s page and pasting it into your page. Some of the oldest examples of widgets are the page view counters that you see on eBay auctions. Usually, a widget provides some kind of value or functionality to the page that it is embedded on. The bottom line is, a widget is something that a webmaster willingly adds to their own website, but they didn’t actually write the code–they got it from somewhere else.
Since inbound links are such an important factor for SEO, websites have started using widget bait to try to increase their backlinks. In other words, a website will develop or distribute a widget that includes a link as part of the code. When another site adds the widget to their site, they are also (sometimes unknowingly) linking out to another site (usually the site that distributed the widget). Since there is such an obvious potential for abuse, Matt Cutts has been asked several questions about what qualifies as acceptable, white-hat widget bait. In my guidelines below, I have tried to expand the black and white definition of acceptable widget bait to include 2 more shades. Why? I don’t know. Shut up.
Now, one of the reasons why I have formatted these widget bait guidelines in this fashion is because I think it makes the information easier to digest. In my experience, Matt Cutts tends to answer questions indirectly, through a series of anecdotes and examples that don’t always “satisfy my query,” if you know what I mean. What’s that? You DON’T know what I mean? Oh… um… well in other words, I have used Matt’s answers as building blocks to construct a hierarchical information structure, whereby the topic of acceptable widget bait practices has been divided into 6 common criteria, each of which is accompanied by a measurement scale, ranging from “good” practices to “spam” practices. Cool?
Anyway… as much as I would love to keep writing things that only I find entertaining, I’m guessing you would prefer that I just get to the point. Fine. Be that way.
Are the links hidden?
- Good – links are clearly visible and recognizable.
- Ok – links are clickable images that appear clickable.
- Bad – links are images that no one would think to click on.
- Spam – links are hidden or invisible, or they are in noscript tags.
How relevant is the widget to the site it links to?
- Good – widget is relevant to the site it links to.
- Ok – widget is relevant to the page it links to, but not relevant to the entire site.
- Bad – widget is loosely related to the site it links to.
- Spam – widget is completely unrelated to the site it links to.
What is the link target?
- Good – link points to the page that provided the widget.
- Ok – link points to a page on the domain that provided the widget.
- Bad – link points to a page on an unrelated, 3rd-party domain.
- Spam – link points to a page on an unrelated, 3rd-party domain… plus it’s a PAID link!
How many links are included in the widget?
- Good – 1.
- Ok – more than 1, but each link is useful, visible, and relevant to the widget and the linked pages.
- Bad – more than 1.
- Spam – widget is stuffed with links, in order to suck maximum amount of link juice from linking page.
Is the link editorial?
- Good – linking site has been clearly informed that the widget includes a link by default. Linking site may remove the link if they wish.
- Ok – linking site has been clearly informed that the widget includes a link by default. The link is a mandatory condition of using the widget and cannot be removed.
- Bad – linking site has been informed that the widget includes a link by default, but the information is not entirely obvious. For example, the information about the link is in fine print or buried at the bottom of an End User License Agreement.
- Spam – linking site has not been informed that the widget contains a link. Linking site is unaware that they are linking to another page by using the widget.
Is the anchor text relevant and natural?
- Good – the anchor text is the name of the site being linked to.
- Ok – the anchor text includes the name of the site being linked to and a relevant keyword that describes the content of the linked page.
- Bad – the anchor text is not user-friendly and natural, or it doesn’t accurately describe the content of the linked page.
- Spam – the anchor text is stuffed with keywords that are not relevant to the content of the linked page.
Now that we have an advanced understanding of white hat widget bait, why don’t we leverage this knowledge by optimizing the SEOmoz badges!
First, let’s look at the page where we would “download” the SEOmoz badge. On this page, we find the code that creates the two different badges that look like this:
The code that we would copy and paste into our page looks like this:
Now the first thing I would do is check this against my now-famous Widget Bait Guidelines. Personally, this is how I would rank the “whiteness” of the SEOmoz badge, in its current state:
Are the links hidden?
- Ok – links are clickable images that appear clickable.
How relevant is the widget to the site it links to?
- Good – widget is relevant to the site it links to.
What is the link target?
- Ok – link points to a page on the domain that provided the widget.
How many links are included in the widget?
Is the link editorial?
- Good – linking site has been clearly informed that the widget includes a link by default. Linking site may remove the link if they wish.
Is the anchor text relevant and natural?
- Good – the anchor text is the name of the site being linked to.
Of course, this is all subject to personal opinion, and ultimately, it’s Matt-n-friends who make the decision on what is or isn’t evil. With that being said…I have to admit that if it were up to ME, I would push the boundaries a little further with this badge. I would make a couple of tweaks in order to squeeze the maximum amount of benefit from this widget. Here’s what I would do, and why…
Change the Alt Attribute – The way it is now, the image has an Alt attribute of I <3 SEOmoz, which the browser renders as I <3 SEOmoz. I’m interested in squeezing the juice out of that keyword. SEO, and in order to do that, I need to isolate it. Google needs a character space on either side of this word, or it won’t acknowledge it. This isn’t like in the SERPs, where Google will play Scrabble with your URL, trying to bold anything and everything it can find. (Matt, please correct me if I’m wrong about that.) In addition to putting a space after SEO, I would also add .org to the end. This would make the Alt text match the image text as closely as possible, resulting in a final Alt attribute of I <3 SEO moz.org.
Change the Images – Now that I added a space between SEO and moz.org, it could be argued that this is slightly deceptive, since the text in the picture doesn’t match the Alt text exactly. To address this, I would modify the images to reflect that space. Here is my version (top) vs. the original version (bottom):
As you can see… my version CLEARLY separates the SEO from the moz.org, by including a 3-pixel space instead of a 2-pixel space. I also took the liberty of making the margins even, redrawing the heart, and adding a pixel of additional space between the M and the O, but those changes were less about SEO and more about OCD.
Alright… I’m done babbling now. Before I go, one quick side note to the SEOmoz staff: the code that’s on the badge page doesn’t have the title attribute included, so if you want the I <3 SEO moz.org to show up as a tooltip in Firefox (like the examples on that page do), then add that attribute in there. =)
Oh wait…one last thing! I would like to let all of you know that I am distributing a brand new widget! You’ll find it below, along with the code that you can copy and paste into your website.
To add this awesome widget to your website:
Copy and paste this code into your webpages:
