Are widgets dangerous after the Panda update?
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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?
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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.
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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?
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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.
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