Wid­get­bait: A Short-Lived SEO Strategy

Wid­get­bait­ing used to be a very ef­fec­tive SEO strat­egy that al­lowed wid­get cre­ators to ac­cu­mu­late a great num­ber of back­links in a very short pe­riod of time.

Some big com­pa­nies used to use wid­get­bait­ing strate­gies on a large scale and got very good re­sults with it.

Google even­tu­ally caught onto this though and changed up its al­go­rithm to greatly di­min­ish the ef­fec­tive­ness of this SEO technique.

What Ex­actly is Widgetbaiting?

Wid­get­bait­ing refers to the prac­tice of em­bed­ding a link in a wid­get that you of­fer (for free) for peo­ple to use on their web­site. A wid­get is a small piece of soft­ware that can be in­stalled on a web­site and of­fers cer­tain func­tion­al­ity. Accuweather.com for ex­am­ple of­fers a num­ber of weather wid­gets that peo­ple can use on their website.

If Ac­cuweather em­beds a link – that is not nec­es­sary for the wid­get’s func­tion­ing - into the code of their weather wid­get, they are wid­get­bait­ing. Any time some­one places this wid­get on their web­site, a back­link will be cre­ated. As you can imag­ine, this prac­tice can be a very ef­fec­tive and cheap way of cre­at­ing links to your website.

What’s Wrong With Widgetbait?

Es­sen­tially, noth­ing is re­ally wrong with wid­get­bait. Google used to be fine with it, as long as wid­gets were only link­ing back to the cre­ator’s web­site and were not used for sell­ing back­links. When you start in­clud­ing a bunch of dif­fer­ent links in your wid­gets, and us­ing key­words that are not rel­e­vant to the wid­get it­self, Google’s not so fine with it any­more. Many web­sites that were us­ing these types of strate­gies have been pe­nal­ized in the last few years. Google also re­vised its qual­ity guide­lines re­gard­ing wid­gets, re­flect­ing their stricter poli­cies on the topic.

Can I Still Use Wid­get­bait for SEO?

This is a bit of a tough ques­tion sur­rounded with a bit of con­tro­versy in the SEO com­mu­nity. Some SEO ex­perts ar­gue that if you only link back to the wid­get cre­ator’s own web­site, make the link vis­i­ble so it can be re­moved by the web­mas­ter, and do not try to stuff in key­words, you should be fine.

Oth­ers opine how­ever that us­ing wid­get­bait as a back­link­ing strat­egy is not worth the risk of be­ing pe­nal­ized by Google. The main is­sue with wid­get­bait is that you don’t know what kind of web­site your wid­get will end up on. If for any rea­son a porn site likes your wid­get and you’ve em­bed­ded a back­link in it, you’ll be adding a back­link to your port­fo­lio that you prob­a­bly rather would­n’t have.

One way to still use wid­gets for SEO in a com­pletely le­git­i­mate way, is to leave out the back­link, but in­stead ask the web­mas­ter of the web­site that is us­ing your link if they would like to link back to your web­site. If you only do this for web­sites that have rel­e­vant con­tent to the back­link you are ask­ing for, there should­n’t be any wor­ries about get­ting penalized.

While wid­get­bait­ing as an SEO strat­egy is not com­pletely dead yet, its best days are def­i­nitely over.