Google, Links and Javascript
-
So today I was taking a look at http://www.seomoz.org/top500 page and saw that the AddThis page is currently at the position 19.
I think the main reason for that is because their plugin create, through javascript, linkbacks to their page where their share buttons reside. So any page with AddThis installed would easily have 4/5 linbacks to their site, creating that huge amount of linkbacks they have.
Ok, that pretty much shows that Google doesn´t care if the link is created in the HTML (on the backend) or through Javascript (frontend). But heres the catch.
If someones create a free plugin for wordpress/drupal or any other huge cms platform out there with a feature that linkbacks to the page of the creator of the plugin (thats pretty common, I know) but instead of inserting the link in the plugin source code they put it somewhere else, wich then is loaded with a javascript code (exactly how AddThis works).
This would allow the owner of the plugin to change the link showed at anytime he wants. The main reason for that would be, dont know, an URL address update for his blog or businness or something.
However that could easily be used to link to whatever tha hell the owner of the plugin wants to.
What your thoughts about this, I think this could be easily classified as White or Black hat depending on what the owners do. However, would google think the same way about it?
-
It's definitely a judgment call. There is legitimate reasoning to have a link to the widget author/creator if it's a single link. And providing the option to not have the link be there helps. Yet it's not 100% clear that Google does or does not penalize for this.
-
I have heard some discussion on wicked fire that Google has been known to penalize or manually de-index sites that use that sort of "widget backlink botnet" for lack of better word. While there might be legit uses for a widget with a link back to your site, Viagra spammers et al use similar scripts on hacked sites to change anchor text and give their sales sites more juice to rank for "buy viagra"
-
But what if the SEO is just a side effect of the link? Lets say, creating a plugin that let the user optinally shows or not a link to the site creator of the plugin, so now you have one less possibly bad thing to worry, after all users show the link only if they want to.
That link could also be seen as a way of the creator of the plugin promoting himself, someone could visit that site, see the plugin, like it and end up on the creators site to download a copy for him.
-
The data you see where AddThis is at position # 19 is not a signal that they're being ranked based on all those links, only that they have that many links. It's heavily debatable as to whether Google discounts all those links or not, however it probably is confirmation that Google might see them.
Now as to whether it's wise to do so or not - that too is debatable. I've personally had a brief discussion with Matt Cutts a while back asking about a specific type of link pattern that had to do with people offering "free services" that ultimately embedded "hidden" or otherwise "questionable" links on pages of sites, fairly similar to the scenario you describe. At the time, he said that those particular links were not a significant factor in the ranking of the sites where those links were pointed to.
Here's the bottom line I take on all of this - creating a service, plug-in or component that embeds links where the purpose of those links are purely for SEO is risky at best, and potentially harmful in the long-run. It may be of some SEO value today, yet it's a primary candidate for being hammered eventually.So personally I always advice clients to not even play that game.
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
-
Tumblr links
I have several Tumblr blogs. Created when Tumblr links were worth more, and now primarily for my amusement. But, I'd like to get whatever link juice I can out of them. I thought only the footer links were do follow, but when I check Moz it's showing all links as do follow. Any idea which is true?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | julie-getonthemap1 -
Is Chamber of Commerce membership a "paid" link, breaking Google's rules?
Hi guys, This drives me nuts. I hear all the time that any time value is exchanged for a link that it technically violates Google's guidelines. What about real organizations, chambers of commerce, trade groups, etc. that you are a part of that have online directories with DO-follow links. On one hand people will say these are great links with real value outside of search and great for local SEO..and on the other hand some hardliners are saying that these technically should be no-follow. Thoughts???
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | RickyShockley0 -
Google adwords destination link issue
In google adwords I set destination link like this http://www.abcd.com/ and like this http/:www.abcd.com so how google adwords react on both this? And how it will show data in adwords? Thanks! Dev
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | devdan0 -
OSE link report showing links to 404 pages on my site
I did a link analysis on this site mormonwiki.com. And many of the pages shown to be linked to were pages like these http://www.mormonwiki.com/wiki/index.php?title=Planning_a_trip_to_Rome_By_using_Movie_theatre_-_Your_five_Fun_Shows2052752 There happens to be thousands of them and these pages actually no longer exist but the links to them obviously still do. I am planning to proceed by disavowing these links to the pages that don't exist. Does anyone see any reason to not do this, or that doing this would be unnecessary? Another issue is that Google is not really crawling this site, in WMT they are reporting to have not crawled a single URL on the site. Does anyone think the above issue would have something to do with this? And/or would you have any insight on how to remedy it?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ThridHour0 -
What To Do With Too Many Links?
We have four pages that have over 100 links (danger, danger from what I gather), but they're not spammy footer links. They are FAQ videos for our four main areas of practice. Does that make a difference? If not, should I just take half the questions on each page and make four additional pages? That strikes me as a worse UX, but I don't want to get penalized either. Thanks, Ruben
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | KempRugeLawGroup0 -
How to Block Google Preview?
Hi, Our site is very good for Javascript-On users, however many pages are loaded via AJAX and are inaccessible with JS-off. I'm looking to make this content available with JS-off so Search Engines can access them, however we don't have the Dev time to make them 'pretty' for JS-off users. The idea is to make them accessible with JS-off, but when requested by a user with JS-on the user is forwarded to the 'pretty' AJAX version. The content (text, images, links, videos etc) is exactly the same but it's an enormous amount of effort to make the JS-off version 'pretty' and I can't justify the development time to do this. The problem is that Googlebot will index this page and show a preview of the ugly JS-off page in the preview on their results - which isn't good for the brand. Is there a way or meta code that can be used to stop the preview but still have it cached? My current options are to use the meta noarchive or "Cache-Control" content="no-cache" to ask Google to stop caching the page completely, but wanted to know if there was a better way of doing this? Any ideas guys and girls? Thanks FashionLux
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | FashionLux0 -
Javascript
Hi there, Quick question: Does Google parse javascript? I have a html ad which contain the anchor text linking to one of our product pages, however the ad unit are javascript based and from this the code is not visible on page source through the browser. Kind Regards
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Paul780