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
-
Should we Nofollow Social Links?
I've been asked the question of whether if we should nofollow all of our social links, would this be a wise thing to do? I'm not exactly getting a clear answer from search results and thought you guys would be best to ask 🙂 Thanks in advance.
Technical SEO | | JH_OffLimits0 -
Will this URL structure: "domain.com/s/content-title" cause problems?
Hey all, We have a new in-house built too for building content. The problem is it inserts a letter directly after the domain automatically. The content we build with these pages aren't all related, so we could end up with a bunch of urls like this: domain.com/s/some-calculator
Technical SEO | | joshuaboyd
domain.com/s/some-infographic
domain.com/s/some-long-form-blog-post
domain.com/s/some-product-page Could this cause any significant issues down the line?0 -
What is the difference between "Referring Pages" and "Total Backlinks" [on Ahrefs]?
I always thought they were essentially the same thing myself but appears there may be a difference? Any one care to help me out? Cheers!
Technical SEO | | Webrevolve0 -
Does the order of results from "site:www.example.com" tell us anything?
Does google rank in order of page authority with "site:www.example.com" or is it random? As most of the results of the first 6 pages for our site are internal search results pages ( eg www.example.com/search/product-results)
Technical SEO | | PaddyDisplays
The fact that search results are index at all is frustrating, they are not linked to internally or externally. The open site explorer does not have any back links for any of the search pages, and I checked the submitted site map and no search urls are submitted, so I don't know how google are finding the search urls. Also tested some of the search urls with aherf and no back links. But since its ranking the search pages ahead of the category(landing) pages with "site:" has me worried that not only are they indexing the urls, but they giving them higher page authority0 -
How do I add "noindex" or "nofollow" to a link in Wordpress
It's been a while since I've SEOed a Wordpress site. How do I add "nofollow" or "noindex" to specific links? I highlight the anchor text in the text editor, I click the "link" button. I could have sworn that there used to be an option in the dialogue box that pops up.
Technical SEO | | CsmBill0 -
We registered with Yahoo Directory. Why won't this show up as a a linking root domain in our link analysis??
Recently checked our link analysis report for 2 of our campaigns who are registered in the dir.yahoo.com (yahoo directory). For some reason, we don't see this being a domain that shows up as linking to our website - why is this?
Technical SEO | | MMP0 -
Is it OK for a sitemap to appear as a "Top URL" in Google Webmaster?
I'm using Google Webmaster (alongside other tools) to understand how Google is indexing my site. One of the tools is "Content Keywords", where it lists keywords that Google sees as significant for your site. The keywords shown are generally fine, but when I click on an individual word, I am often seeing our sitemap as one of the "Top URLs" that the keyword is found on (our sitemap is at system/sitemap1.xml.gz) - is this OK? Obviously I don't want to add the sitemap URL to robots.txt, but I also want to ensure that 'real' user-focused pages (e.g. our homepage) appear higher in the "Top URLs" list for the keywords, as I'm assuming this is an indicator of how the site is performing in search. Any help appreciated!
Technical SEO | | anilababla0 -
How do I know which page a link is from
I've got an interesting situation. I hope you can help. I have a list of links but I'm not sure which pages of my site they are from. How do I know which page a specific link is from? Thanks in advance.
Technical SEO | | VinceWicks0