Google Reminds Users About Policy on Widget Links

September 8, 2016

Google posted on their webmaster central blog this morning a reminder about their policy on keyword-rich, hidden, or low-quality links embedded in a website widget. In case you didn’t know, creating a widget with keyword-rich links in the widget is a practice that is against Google’s Webmasters Guidelines. These links are considered spammy because they are not naturally placed by the website.

In their blog post, they provided a couple examples of what types of widgets go against their guidelines.

If you create a widget link like these for your company, then Google’s webspam team may take a manual action on your website for unnatural links. If you receive a manual penalty, you will receive a notification through Search Console.

You can resolve the issue by add a nofollow attribute (rel=”nofollow”) but your best bet is to just remove the links entirely.

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