Forum Moderators: Robert Charlton & goodroi
Our site collects data about a particular topic daily and currently makes this data available as an HTML table on a particular page on our site. The content of the table changes daily when new data is gathered for that day.
What follows is NOT my specific application, but an example of something similar for the purpose of having something to discuss:
Imagine if our site tracked the minimum, maximum and average price of 10 products - ProductA and 9 other products closely related to ProductA - across 20 major online retailers. Our site would have a page dedicated to showing the prices of these products and would render this data as a simple 4 column HTML table with Product Name, Min Price, Max Price, and Avg Price as the column headers. There would be 10 data rows in the table - one for each product. The page on our site where this table is displayed would contain other related content and links to/from other pages related to ProductA - I'll call this page that I want to promote the ProductA Price Page. We might have the page optimized for 3 phrases - "ProductA Prices", "Current ProductA Prices", and "Average ProductA Prices" in order of importance.
I would like to build widget of some sort that would allow other sites to render our HTML table on their sites with the goal being to boost the rankings of our ProductA Price Page by sending link juice from those sites either directly (preferable) or indirectly to the ProductA Price Page on our site, preferably even controlling the link text used to link back to the ProductA Price Page.
I have come up with the following two options (each having their own pros and cons). At a high level they boil down to:
1) Create a web service that a remote site can hit when rendering the HTML for their page using a server side scripting language (php, asp[x], etc) which will return the HTML to render the simple table. The HTML, of course, would have a backlink of the form <a href="http://www.example.com/producta-prices.asp">my link text</a> where "my link text" is one of the three phrases above that I want the page to rank for. The site would call the web service and get back the HTML required to render the table and insert the HTML returned by the web service as is into their own HTML when building their page. So this table looks as though it is part of the other site's page but is actually being rendered from our site.
2) Create a page on my site that renders ONLY the ProductA Price table (no navigation, no other content). Basically, the HTML for this page would render the the ProductA Price table as described in #1 above (exact same HTML to render the table) except it will be a valid HTML document <HTML><HEAD>...</HEAD><BODY>code to render table</BODY></HTML>. The other sites would render this using an <iframe>.
Of course, part of the TOS for using the web service or the iframe version of the table,
Each has it's own pros and cons:
Web Service:
Pros:
1) Sites would likely be required to 'register' for this service (a pro and a con). They would have to indicate on which domains they plan to use it. They would be assigned a SiteUID which would only be valid if the request comes from one of their registered domains. So I can control who uses it and possibly even automate monitoring its use to insure they are adhering to the TOS (i.e. rendering the HTML exactly as it is returned from my site, not removing my backlink, etc.). This will allow me to prevent any shady site or site not adhering to the TOS from using the service. I would simply delete their registration to stop them from using it.
2) At registration time I can assign site particular attributes. For example, if I want 50% of the sites to get a table with "ProductA Prices" as the link text in the back link, 30% to get "Current ProductA Prices" as the link text, and 20% to get "Average ProductA Prices" as the link text, this could be determined and stored at registration time. I may also want to 'tweak' other parts of the table like the 'header' row of the table, the column header row, etc. so that the text rendered for those supports the anchor text of the link. I might also let them choose from several border styles, fonts, etc. at registration time to use as the default (but allow them to override these at runtime by calling the service with specific parameters for these settings.
3) Link juice will flow from the pages on the remote sites using our widget directly to my ProductA Price Page.
4) Anyone folliwing a back link to our site gets the ProductA Price Page with full site navigation.
Cons:
1) Sites would be required to register for this service (not too much of a con, but it is an extra step).
2) It requires more complex changes to their server side scripting to call the web service. This will likely make it much harder to get sites to adopt this version of the tool, therefore I would gain fewer backlinks than option #2.
3) Couldn't be implemented on an HTML only site.
iFrame:
Pros:
1) Sites are not required to register in advance. (one less step to get up and going - pro from their point of view, con from mine).
2) The code that is required to implement such a widget on a remote site is a simple <iframe> tag.
3) This could be implemented on HTML only sites.
Cons:
1) It's not nearly as simple to disallow a site from using this type of widget. With the web service, I can simply delete their registration and their subsequent requests will be denied.
2) I lose control of the link text by site.
3) Link juice will from from the remote sites to my page that is being iframed. My page that is being iframed will pass juice through a single link to the page I'm trying to make rank - the ProductA Prices Page. The iframed page only has a table on it (no other content) so it's not likely to rank well.
4) If the iframed page does by some miracle rank well and show up in the SERPS it's almost a dead end page except for the one link to the ProductA Price Page so a bad user experience and likely low click-thru to the rest of the site. So I'd likely add a <meta name="robots" content="noindex,follow"> tag to the iframed page.
My questions:
1) I'm not very familiar with iframes, so excuse my ignorance. But if I did use the iframe options, can I embed a clean link directly to my ProductA Prices Page like the following so that my ProductA Price Page gets juice directly from the remote sites and would this be a proper use of the <iframe> tag?
<iframe src="http://www.example.com/widgets/producta-prices.aspx">
Your browser doesn't support frames or is currently configured to not display frames. However, you may visit
the following URL to view this content: <a href="http://www.example.com/producta-prices.htm">ProductA Prices</a>
</iframe>
In this scenario, does the "Your browser doesn't support frames..." message only get displayed if they have frames disabled or their browser doesn't support it?
2) Are there other options for implementing this type of backlink generating widget?
3) Am I wasting my time thinking about this? Is it even worth it?
Thanks in advance!
And again, sorry for such a long post. Just wanted to give as complete a picture as possible.
