Widgetbait Gone Wild – Great SEO Article From SEOMoz
Posted on | April 18, 2008 | No Comments
Just finished reading a great “widgetbait” article written by Matthew Inman @ SEOMoz.org.
It’s a great post written about how they ranked a site for keywords such as “free online dating” and “online dating,” but then got hit by a Google penalty. What was basically being done is distributing free widgets for blogs and having a link at the bottom of the widget to other sites that were being promoted. Clever idea, yes, but it hurt one site in the end. Very well written article!
“we made a godzilla-turd-sized mistake” :
As soon as we discovered that we had been penalized, we immediately filed a reconsideration request. Matt Cutts got involved in the case personally, but after a couple of emails, the penalty was not lifted. The basis for the penalty was:
- We cross-promoted other websites with our widget/quizzes on JustSayHi
- The other domains we promoted were in very spammy sectors and had duplicate content issues
- JustSayHi had some paid links/inclusions in our link profiles (these were prior to my arrival, but nonetheless are part of our history)
- Our reconsideration request was truthful but not as forthcoming as it might have been. We were asked to list all the spammy domains, and I only listed the two we had promoted with the quizzes, not the entire network which was owned by a separate company. In our defense, we knew very little about these domains (their history, how many there actually were, etc), but we should have done our homework.
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