Does AddThis social sharing toolbar hurt your ranking?

[eric1981]

I was reviewing my site that has penalized by Google for violating their buidelines.

And I found the AddThis tool bar may be a problem.Then I read this article:
[phill.co...]

I was not much concerned about the link juicing giving to AddThis.My concern was about the fact that this tool bar has the following feature that might violate Google's guideline:

1. It uses Style Visibility=hidden
2. It has its own Head and Body,which add to the original page that it's installed,making the page 2 heads and 2 bodies.
3. It uses iframe

I am not quite sure about those.Can anyone please clarify to me IF those 3 may hurt the ranking?

[tedster]

1. visibility:hidden is only a problem if there's no way for a normal user action to make the element visible.

2. It has it's own head and body because it is using an iframe and actually "lives" on its own URL. In other words, it's not adding anything extra to your url.

3. There's no problem using iframes. It's true that malware sites use iframes to hide their nasty business, but it's the malware itself that causes the problems, not the iframe.

So all you're left with is linking back to the site itself - the creator of this widget. That's a personal choice, but not really an SEO problem of any magnitude. As far as I can tell nothing here is a cause for a penalty.