What are risks people are seeing with Widget links?
-
This September, Matt Cutts announced a new crackdown on widget links. But they clearly still work so it's a matter of scale and usage in IMO.
Years ago I started recommending changing links within widgets to use branded anchor text instead of keyword rich anchor text so as not to create an unusual amount of keyword focused anchor text. It's also clearly more natural. So far this has been working very well.
The new warning is concerning and I recognize the "best practice" according to Google would be to no-follow these links, but I'm not quite ready to do this unless a risk of unrecoverable penalty is apparent.
My thoughts are it's a matter of scale. If there are tens of thousands of widget links and they dominate the link profile that would be a serious matter. If there are only thousands of widget links and they are a small part of the total link profile it is much less of a concern.
Does anyone have any direct experience with getting warnings on this matter?
-
If I was you I wouldn't take the risk, i have had a few clients have this as an issue in the past. As I don't know your link profile I can't say for sure but a good link profile should be made up of all different types of links.
The risk here is these links are not earned in googles eyes or in some cases other websites don't know they are giving the link back to you.
I always work off the idea that if I feel like there is a risk it's not Worth it. You might get away with it from a algorithm point of view but you just need a manual review to happen and it's going to be a lot harder.
Wish you the best of luck with it.
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
-
Links Not Detected by MOZ, AHREFS, GSC-ARE THESE QUALITY LINKS?
Our SEO provider has been creating content (6 blog posts per month as well as building page write ups) and has been promoting that content. Several links per month have been created as a result of this effort. Many of the links have been from commercial real estate publications. I am concerned that the quality of these links is not high enough to improve our ranking. Most links do not appear on AHREFS, Google Search Console or MOZ. Is this a red flag that these links are weak? Ranking and traffic on the site have improved considerably since this provider began the project in April of 2019. They have been writing about 30 pages about New York City. commercial buildings each month in addition to 4 short blog posts and 2 extremely well researched and authoritative blog posts. My concern is that the links are not of sufficient quality to result increased ranking. That the improvement in ranking is solely due to the addition of new content rather than the creation of these links. Basically, that I am incurring the cost on an ongoing basis of an link building campaign with little to no benefit. That being the case, I would shift resources to content creation and increase and improve content rather than develop links with little value. A sample of links are below: Would greatly appreciate some feedback as to whether these are in fact helpful to the domain authority, reputation and ranking of our website. Thanks,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Kingalan1
Alan https://patch.com/new-york/bayside/bayside-queens-priciest-area-retail-office-space-study https://qns.com/story/2019/12/04/these-commercial-streets-in-queens-were-among-the-most-expensive-in-2019/ https://patch.com/new-york/brooklyn/flatbush-ave-priciest-retail-spot-outside-manhattan-study http://thejewishvoice.com/2019/12/07/nycs-most-expensive-commercial-streets-neighborhoods-in-2019-would-surprise-you/ https://atalyst.com/investment-banking-interview-metro-manhattan/0 -
How to determine the value of these links?
Hi Guys, How can you determine the value of external links which are deep inside a website. Two examples: http://www.sheknows.com/community/home/ten-tips-buy-car-insurance Two sub-folders deep. http://www.dogfoodhowto.com/899/whats-the-best-puppy-food-for-cockapoo-puppy-at-home.html One sub-folder deep. These links are clearly far from the homepage, so was wondering if they are worthless or how can you determine the value of them? Cheers.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | nattyhall0 -
Links from MOZ, Harmful?
I have listed my domain in several Ask the Community requests. These have resulted in links from the Ask the Community posts showing up in MOZ site explorer. So actual links have been detected. Are these links harmful to my link profile? The content is not at all related to commercial real estate which is the subject of our website. Thanks, Alan
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Kingalan10 -
Unpaid Followed Links & Canonical Links from Syndicated Content
I have a user of our syndicated content linking to our detailed source content. The content is being used across a set of related sites and driving good quality traffic. The issue is how they link and what it looks like. We have tens of thousands of new links showing up from more than a dozen domains, hundreds of sub-domains, but all coming from the same IP. The growth rate is exponential. The implementation was supposed to have canonical tags so Google could properly interpret the owner and not have duplicate syndicated content potentially outranking the source. The canonical are links are missing and the links to us are followed. While the links are not paid for, it looks bad to me. I have asked the vendor to no-follow the links and implement the agreed upon canonical tag. We have no warnings from Google, but I want to head that off and do the right thing. Is this the right approach? What would do and what would you you do while waiting on the site owner to make the fixes to reduce the possibility of penguin/google concerns? Blair
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BlairKuhnen0 -
Site wide links removal
A website of mine has about 4,000 backlinks of which 2,500 of them are coming from one website to the homepage and about 6 internal pages. These have been built up over about 5 years, mainly via article posts. The site was recently hit via penguin 2.0 but has only had natural links built so i'm wondering if the sitewide links are in fact the issue? The website linking to mine is an authority source within its niche but the concern is the amount of backlinks coming from this one site and if it may now be seen as having a negative impact. When ive reviewed the links from this one site via a backlink removal tool about 80% seem fine and suggestions are to remove about 20% of the backlinks. Would you keep all the sitewide backlinks or remove them?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jazavide
Have you come across a similar situation and how did it affect ranking/traffic?0 -
Do I have any harmful links? If so, what should I do?
URL in question: www.nasserilegal.com/criminal.html I'm using OSE and see some questionable backlinks. At first glance, if you look at the page authority and domain authority, they look great. Once you go to the actual pages, they look spammy. If the links are hurting the rankings for the site, should I try to remove the links manually or just ignore and continue to build good quality links or even build a new site? I noticed for the last couple of weeks, the rankings started to slip. Thanks in Advance, Lucas
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | micasalucasa0 -
Article Marketing For Link Building
Just wanted to get a discussion going about the effectiveness of article marketing for building links. All of my content will be decent and unique. I will submit to the following 10 directories: Ezine Buzzle Goarticles Article Dashboard Sooperarticles Helium Articlebase Articlealley Isnare Article City Of course, varied anchor text and relevant content to my various niches. I just want to know if this is still an effective link building strategy. Please don't recommend i "try" something else because i am doing everything else as well. Thanks guys
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | danielblinman0 -
Links from tumblr
I have two links from hosted tumblr blogs which are not on tumblr.com. So, website1 has a tumblr blog: tumblr.website1.com And another site website2.com also uses the a record/custom domains option from tumblr but not on a subdomain, which is decribed below: http://www.tumblr.com/docs/en/custom_domains Does this mean that all links from such sites count as coming from the same IP in google's eyes? Or is there value in getting links from multiple sites because the a-record doesn't affect SEO in a negative way? Many thanks, Mike.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | team740
