Offered a free widget that links to my site

Now I’m wondering what the effect will be

[andyll]

Maybe I should have thought more of the implications before I offered it.

It is a dynamically generated image that users put in their forum signatures that links back to my homepage.

Some questions:

1)It is growing almost exponential. After a week 2000 links Monday… mostly from my own forum (same domain) where my moderators have gone crazy. But Monday night (my server rolls the log over early my time) I had over 2000 in 4 hours… about 3-400 of them not from my forums. I’m a little worried about being sandboxed but I don’t see what I can do about it.

2)Most of the images are BBS code links which means no Alt Text is available (correct me if I’m wrong). My users almost always add text that is directly related to my keywords but it is embedded in the image. I’ve thought about adding that text as a parameter to the URL as a replacement for anchor/alt text. Will that help?

3)Pretty soon I’ll have 1000s of links generated daily pointing to my homepage. Any reason I shouldn’t spread the links around to some deeper pages? In looking at my logs the last week or so I’ve noticed that now 10% of my traffic seems to be from people typing in the URL they are seeing on these images… rarely are they clicking on it.

Anything else I should look for? I’ve gone from rarely getting links to getting 100s… soon to be 1000s of new links a day. Sandbox seems to be in my future.

I’ve upgraded my VPS one level but I guess in a few months I might need a server just to handle the image processing.

Andy

[edited by: andyll at 6:38 am (utc) on Mar. 11, 2008]

[martinibuster]

Do you think it would pass a hand check at Google or Yahoo if an upset competitor files a spam report?

[andyll]

Do you think it would pass a hand check at Google or Yahoo if an upset competitor files a spam report?

The 'widget' itself? Absolutely. My site is a popular travel destination and the 'widget' is common.

The 'Widget' providers up until now have been generic and my site is niche. Forums in this niche generally allow these widgets in their forum sigs even when they don't allow other links (my forum included)

Why my competitors have never offered this service I dont' know... they seem to be relying on their forums for their business.

I would welcome a personal hand check of what I am doing over just going into the sandbox.

Andy

[martinibuster]

It has occurred in the past that sites giving out some other kind of free widget have been banned. So the thing to look out for, or the time to look over your shoulder, is if the sites linking back to your site are doing it because the link is embedded in the widget in exchange for a useful widget. That's treading a line where some, perhaps a relatively few, sites in the past have not passed the hand check.

Your widget is probably different.

[cnvi]

unless you have found a cure for cancer, obtaining links in this high volume manner will surely be detected by search engine algorythms so you are asking for a penalization. If you dont care about traffic from the search engines, go for it. If your doing this primarily to affect your search rankings, you are playing with fire in my opinion.

[andyll]

Your widget is probably different.

I hope so.

99% will be in Disney related and parenting forums so I'm fairly comfortable of not being linked to from a bad neighborhood. Plus it will be from domains with related content.

You did make me realize that I need to get a TOS around this and write a utility to give me daily who’s linking.

obtaining links in this high volume manner will surely be detected by search engine algorithms so you are asking for a penalization. If you don’t care about traffic from the search engines, go for it. If you’re doing this primarily to affect your search rankings, you are playing with fire in my opinion.

Sandbox I can live with... penalization would be painful.

The other domains offering these tickers do not seem to be penalized but the links do seem to be devalued.

The primary reason for doing this was to give my users a useful widget. But if I'm going to have 1000s of these out there that my servers going to have to generate dynamic images for then I'd like to get some link benefit also.

Andy