: The badges they refer to are simply image links for your site. A lot of sites have these sort of images that they offer visitors for linking back to them. A more common name for them is

The badges they refer to are simply image links for your site. A lot of sites have these sort of images that they offer visitors for linking back to them. A more common name for them is a button ("button image", "link button", etc.).

If you have a nice badge and ask your visitors nicely, and you also provide good content/a useful service, then, sure, a badge could probably increase the number of links to your site a little, and thus increase your search ranking.

That said, however, badges alone aren't going to make a huge difference on most sites. I mean, how many webmasters want to put a free banner/button ad to another website on their own website? It might be a good tactic if you have the right brand for it (e.g. a snowboard company, a clothing company, or other "hip" brands), but if your website is for a travel agency/law firm/hardware store/etc. then I don't see it being much help. And, to be honest, Attracta's auto-generated badges are pretty ugly; if you're looking for a good badge maker, I'd try this site: 80x15.

Lastly, I also found some anomalies while searching Attracta's website. If you do a Google search for "badges site:attracta.com" you get a lot of results that are redirects to GetSatisfaction questions for Foursquare. I don't know if there's some kind of relationship between the companies but it seems pretty weird. It looks like it's a 302 temporary redirect, causing Google to treat Attracta's page as the GetSatisfaction page. Now, maybe there's an innocent explanation for this that I'm missing, but this is a common technique used by blackhat SEOs to hijack the PR of another site. Supposedly it's been fixed by Google, but maybe it hasn't, or Attracta simply forget to take these redirects down.

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