Listly and SEO

[MarkQJones]

We use listly quite a lot. A few of our lists get embedded in other sites. A lot of the embedded lists have links back to us. Is there any seo benefit on this, or will just one of the sites count ? Isn't this just duplicate content ? Wondering what your thoughts are.

[Cyrus-Shepard]

Nick Kellet at List.ly reached out to let me know move about the service. He gave me permission to copy and paste his email below.

From Nick...

"I'd love to fill you in on the details of Listly and SEO

Sure we offer iframes, and embed, but they are really secondary options.Our first choice is to use our Wordpress plugin, which means a list embedded in a post is treated as part of the post. ie your content is SEO searchable.Wordpress is just a first stop in executing our full vision for Listly.Crowd contributions ensure your post is ever changing, we know that brings significant impact to search results.This changes the lifecycle value of a single post from an SEO perspective.I'd be happy to share more and give you some examples of what this means in terms of organic search.I'm you'll be impressed and curious.We also have some great local search examples too.The anchor text is controllable from Listly. List items on your lists are freely nameable."

[Cyrus-Shepard]

I'm not that familiar with Listly, (Edit: See my other answer in this thread) but it looks like an interesting site. It appears they have several different types of embed codes so I can't comment on a particular style, but I can offer some general thoughts about embed codes and links.

1. It's generally helpful to have other sites link to you. That said, some of the embed codes appear to use either javascript or iframes, so the value passed from those links would be hard to determine.

2. On the other hand, Google typically frowns upon links built at scale from widgets or embed codes, especially if they contain optimized, keyword rich anchor text.

In general, I'd say these links are probably okay as long as you don't abuse the anchor text in anyway. I'm unsure if you can control the anchor text using listly, but this means using descriptive, non-comercial anchor text like:

• "Mark's profile"
• "markswebsite.com"
• "Our Listly lists"

If you're concerned about it, you can always point the links to a neutral 3rd party site, like your Google+ profile. But I'd be very, very careful about linking to yourself with widgets like these using any sort of anchor text you wanted to rank for.

Hope this helps! Best of luck with your SEO.