Should I add no-follow tags to my widget links?
-
Matt Cutts recommended in a video in 2013 to add rel="nofollow" on widget links that link back to your website.
Some background of my company: We're a software company for website chat. There's a 'powered by' link in our widgets that links back from our users' websites to our website. Currently these are all follow links.
I checked out the links of our competitors, and it seems none of them have no follow on their widget backlinks. This, together with the fact that the video is quite old and information on this issue rather scarce, makes me doubt whether we should change our widget backlinks to no follow.
Does anyone have thoughts on this?
-
Hello Pascal,
Like Hillary Clinton, I have a public opinion and a private opinion when it comes to stuff like this. The public opinion is also Google's, and that is to use a rel="nofollow" attribute on widget links. They are considered links that webmasters use to manipulate the search engine rankings. Yes, that video is old, but the rule still stands as far as Google is concerned.
My private opinion is that widgets are a form of branding, and it is not a webmaster's responsibility to do anything other than get their brand discovered far and wide. You created a widget that, if people are using it, probably provides some value to them. Why should you get any less credit for this than you would get from someone linking to the widget on your site?
If you are going to keep the links followable, my advice is to keep the anchor text branded and the href pointing to your home page. This is the least likely to seem like link-graph manipulation. Avoid deep-links, unless they go to the widget download page, and avoid optimized anchor text. Use "YourDomain.com" or "Your Brand" instead.
I'll leave the question open for more input since this isn't a question that necessarily has a single "right" or "wrong" answer.
-
Hmmmm, Google will likely deem your widget as an advertising tool and in their world this is potentially deemed negative, as such you have to make the call, do you want to stay on Google side and follow what they say or continue and then fall foul to some kind of penalty.
I personally would add rel="nofollow" to be on the safe side. Hopefully this won't dramatically affect your rankings.
Could you potentially trial the nofollow on a segment of the plugins to see how it impacts your rankings. Scary I know, but possibly the only way you can see how it could affect you.
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
-
HELP: Why do I have a 61% score for "% of total links, external + follow"?
Firstly, I understand what this percentage is. It's the ratio of external links that are "follow" -> compared to the links that are "no-follow". Four questions: This is definitely not accurate! I have loads of no-follow links Does anyone have ideas or techniques to add more healthy no-follow links? Am I completely misunderstanding this? Will this high score negatively affect my ranking? I could definitely use some help. Thanks so much in advance. I don't think my website address should help, but if you need it for context, it's estatediamondjewely.com.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SamCitron0 -
Should we no-follow it or no?
We run the biggest yellow pages in Lithuania, and lately we have allowed companies to put their facebook' links on the info page. You can see the facebook button on the left: http://www.visalietuva.lt/imone/fcr-media-lietuva-uab We put the no-follow attribute for now. Should we do that or just leave it as follow and expect that Google will count this as "trustworthy" link? I hope I made it pretty clear 🙂 Thank you very much.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | FCRMediaLietuva0 -
Should I nofollow my Wordpress tags?
I have a website that have a strong root domain (ranking on many terms) but the subpages (articles) doesn't rank well. My feeling is that the linkjuice is not flowing to them (not enough anyway). When I run site:http://mydomain.com I have my root as the first result and the next many results are tagpages on my sites. I have arund 180 index pages, and I need to go to down to result #50 give or take before I see any subpage using the site command. My website theme have the tags on every page possible. The tags are useful for my viewers, but not SEO useful, but I fear that they are dilluting my linkjuice. Should I nofollow and noindex them? Noindex makes sense (the tags are just duplicate content featuring snippets of text from the articles). But Nofollow would make sense too since I wouldn't send any linkjuice through the tags. What would you guys do? Bests regards
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | claus101 -
Wikipedia links - any value?
Hello everyone. We recently posted some of our research to Wikipedia as references in the "External Links" section. Our research is rigorous and has been referenced by a number of universities and libraries (an example: https://www.harborcompliance.com/information/company-suffixes.php). Anyway, I'm wondering if these Wikipedia links have any value beyond of course adding to the Wiki page's information. Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Harbor_Compliance0 -
Should i use Categories or Tags ?
Hi 🙂 My blog is http://www.dota2club.com/ and i am not sure should i use Categories as tags or normally tags like most ? And how much are important tags generally ? Right now you can see that i am using Categories as tags , is this ok ? Thank you !!!!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | wolfinjo1 -
Measurement of Link Value
Over the past few months I have encountered webmasters who claim to be using instruments far better than open site explorer but they will not disclose what they are. Are there better ways of determining the value of a link than OSE? Is "link juice" more important than page/domain authority where the link resides? Or vice-vesa. Any help understanding this would be appreciated. I do not want to offend other webmasters but I also do not want to be fooled by them either while negotiating a link exchange with them
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | casper4340 -
Too many links!
Hi, I'm running a wordpress blog (modhop.com) and am getting the "too many links" on almost all of my pages. It appears that in addition to basic site navigation I have plug-ins that create invisible links that are counted in the crawl...at least that's my guess. Is there a good way to control this in wordpress? A nofollow in the .htaccess? A plug-in that does this? (I'm sort of at novice-plus level here so the simplest solution is ideal.) Thanks! Jake modhop.com
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | modhop0 -
Footer sitewide links
Here's a question - does having a "website designed by" reference in the footer of every page of one of your clients help or hurt? I have a major university .edu that I designed a site for one of their departments and it is just about to launch and they've allowed me to put a reference in the footer. I've had pretty good luck with this on my other clients' sites, but didn't know if this practice is seen as spammy. Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Chas-2957210