Jeremy Schoemaker recently made a post entitled I Liked Your Widget Until I Saw Your Spammy Embeded Links that caught my eye.
Jeremy’s post mentions the new reading level widget that is suppose to state the reading level required to read a specific blog. He then says he was going to mention that creating a widget and linking back to your site is an awesome way to score links, but then posts the code which actually uses a link to a payday loans site.
All of this is fine and I agree 100%. However, the problem lies within the webmaster community.
A while back JustSayHi was raking in thousands of links daily due to a couple of his widgets being front-paged on Digg.com and mentioned on almost every high-profile blog. The webmaster has since been on WebmasterRadio, praised as a link-baiting god, and had his method mentioned at almost every SEO convention since.
Why is JustSayHi being praised? Every widget he created has a link back to his dating site with “City dating site” or “State dating site” helping him reach #1 on Google for many large cities across the USA. So why then is Criticsrant being criticized for doing the exact same thing?
Then, there are the commenters on Shoemoney.com. A few have mentioned using the widget but deleting the HTML with the link. Firstly, how does that make them better than the person offering a free widget? In order to use the widget you must use the exact code provided and doing otherwise is considered copyright infringement. Secondly, you are using the authors bandwidth without giving full credit to the author.
The other comments being made on Shoemoney is how the reading level widget is a “scam” or “link spam”. Spamming? Perhaps, but not necessarily. Even without the extra link to “payday loans” it could be considered spam. Scam? Definitely not. Is it misleading to gain a link? Not at all. The code is placed plain as day and you as a webmaster have the choice of A) Placing it on your blog or B) Not placing it on your blog. This is just as bad as people complaining of McDonalds making them fat!
So please webmasters around the world, quit being two-faced. Quit complaining about a silly widget and praising another for doing the exact same.
Written: Jan 18, 2008
Eric
January 20, 2008 @ 1:57 pm
hmmm…
I visited the site this morning and the “put these images on your blog” widgets come with a note at the bottom of the page that says you can indeed delete the last part of the code if you want… meaning… you don’t have to keep the spammy link there.
Gary R. Hess
January 20, 2008 @ 2:00 pm
The note was very recently added. I assure you it was not there long ago when it was popular.