Widget Bait for Link Love

The recent launch of an amazing MP3 widget by Amazon, made me do a little research on some very interesting widget ideas in the market and the role such widgets can play in a successful link building campaign. For those of you, who are unaware of the term widget, widget is nothing but a small stand alone web applications that can be installed and executed in web page without installing extra plugins. Check out these cool widgets Apple & Amazon. Even Yahoo! has a dedicated widget gallery featuring some really cool widgets for free download.

The Power of Widgets
The god of widgets as I call him, Mathew Inman (why god? Check out his widget gallery) generated thousands of links for his website Justsayhi with widgets like this and this, just untill when Google decided to ban Justsayhi. But wait, why would Google ban a website for distributing widgets? Actually Justsayhi wasn’t baned for distributing Widgets for link building but for cross-promoting a spammy website network with its widget & quizzes. If you still doubt the power of a widget, go and ask Zillow, how much money and links did they raised from Zestimate (property evaluation widget ) and out of the famous Zillow-Yahoo teamup.

Widget Bait for Link Love:
Generating server crashing traffic and links requires four things – good idea, designer, programmer and a crystal marketing channel to promote the widget (Email Marketing rocks). After you develop your widget, insert URL link in the interface and showcase it on your website for a free download. People use it and if they find it cool, they embed it in their own website for free with the help of the simple instructions on your website. But make sure you use different keywords in links otherwise same anchor text may go against you on Google. Here are two smart ways how you can generate links for your website and make your green bar go dancing.

• Create some rocking Wordpress themes and showcase them on your website as free ware with back link to your website.
• This one is too good. Create a contact form widget that uses Google Docs as database.

If you are creative and have good understanding about your industry, you can also come up with hundreds of such widget bait ideas. But remember, for the success of your widget, it’s important that an average non-techie user should be able to understand and use the widget application and it must be really easy to implement/install.

There are many powerful widgets that can help you to control the web around you. Here are few of them:

1. Bookmark This
2. Email Subscription Widget
3. Picture Badge
4. Recent Visitor
5. Search Blog
6. Snapshot widget
7. Twitter Update
8. Playlist Video Widget
9. Web Poll Widget
10. What I am Listening

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Google Empowers Your Competitors To Destroy Your Search Engine Rankings

No matter how smart you are, with the current Google algorithms, you can never run away from the possibility of your competitors destroying your presence on the Search Engines by using Google’s savvy algorithms against you. There are variety of ways, how your evil competitors can do this:

1. Google proxy hacking
2. Automated Comment spamming your website’s URL on explicit websites.
3. Automated directory submission of your website in crap directories (your ranking on Yahoo may jump but Google will surely bury you for links from such directories).
4. Your competitor might generate hundreds of links with same anchor text from single IP address.
5. Your competitors might use content scrapping scripts to replicate your entire website. So many times, I have seen Google penalizing the original website and ranking the content scrappers.
6. 301/302/Javascript redirect hijacking.

The consequence of such attacks are not always fatal but even a drop of 5 places can hurt your website’s traffic badly. I know that if you have strong immunity (Google trust rank) you can survive such competitor attacks but it takes time and efforts to build such a strong immunity and not every websites is blessed with it. I don’t think Google should allow website’s competitor destroy its ranking just because it has a weak immunity.

Solutions

• Block the IP address of the websites scrapping your content.
• There are many ways to fight Google proxy hacking like mod rewrite from .htacceess file, reverse cloaking & other PHP scrips.
• Use honeypots.

Additionally, what I feel Google can do here is to let the webmasters drop the the links manually from their webmaster central account which they think might harm their website’s ranking and immunity. Search Engines need to evolve…big time!!!
Image credit: flickr

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Highlights from the RedAlkemi party bash

On the evening of 30th April, RedAlkemists (all dressed up in blue and white) were all set to rock the party which started at 6.30 PM at our very own Entertainment Center. It was an absolute blast as we all danced our souls out to the groove of Music (with a hint of vodka). What do I say, thumping music, yummy food, high spirits and people dancing like crazy. To add to the funk, a tattoo artist was called who did every thing to bring us as close to the species of real party animals (just look at the pictures below and you will understand what I mean).

In the end, I think it was a much needed party for all of us as it helped us rejuvenate and restore our energy levels back to optimum. We all had a terrific time. Cheers!

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