: How does JavaScript and links that power "Add to your site" content affect SEO? Lots of big sites share their contents via 'add to your site' scripts. (scripts, we use on left column etc..

@Eichhorn148

The typical term for links from your content on other sites that is fetched by JavaScript is "Widget SEO".

The biggest danger in distributing widgets is that Google may view the links that go with them as "unnatural" and penalize your site. Matt Cutts has a video about the subject where he strongly advises using nofollow on any link that goes along with a widget.

From an SEO standpoint, using nofollow negates the SEO value you get from widgets. You can still use clear widget links for SEO as long as you follow some quality guidelines. I've used widget SEO successfully for a couple different sites.


Use your brand name or domain name as link anchor text. Most of the penalties that Google has doled out for widget SEO are for sites that use keyword rich anchor text. Here is one story of a site penalized for using keyword rich widget link anchor text: Widgetbait Gone wild
Allow any links to be removed from the widget. It is possible to enforce the existence of links either through technical means (the JavaScript checks for the link and won't display the content without it), or through contractual agreements (widget terms of service). Google has said that not allowing link removal from the widget is blackhat and worth a penalty.


I've never seen any problems from sitewide links or even bad neighborhoods that use widgets. One of my widgets was used on every page on a network of seven pornography websites. I was somewhat worried about it, but it never caused a penalty. Of course, these links were a small percentage of the total links that these widgets brought in.

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@Cofer257

Firstly, site-wide links themselves are rarely "toxic". Usually they are just ignored by search engines.

However, if a link to your site comes from a "toxic" (very low-quality) site, potentially it could damage your ranking. But the chance of this happening is extremely low: spam sites are just spam and don't usually add these kinds of scripts. And the spam sites should be massively outweighed by good sites.

The other thing to note is that these things use JavaScript, so there is no actual HTML link in the page source - it uses JS to make the link. So some search engines will not see the link, while Google (which does parse JS) may treat it differently to a normal link.

As a precaution, it could be a good idea to add rel="nofollow" to the links.

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