Widgetbait Gone Wild

Here's the deal: I build links. I build a lot of them - tens of thousands every month.

How do I do this? I create fun online quizzes and then provide HTML code with quiz scores that bloggers and website owners can embed on their own sites. A good example is this widget, which tells you if you talk too much in your blog, or this one, which tests your ability to survive on the moon. You take the quiz, I give you some HTML code that displays your score, and you embed a snippet of HTML code in your blog. In addition to a link to the quiz, I also add a link to my dating site with the anchor text of my choice. This was how I managed to get JustSayHi ranked for keywords such as "Free Online Dating" and "Online Dating." The link is not hidden using CSS or Javascript, we leave it in plain view so that users can remove it if they wish (and many do).

Some of you might remember I left SEOmoz last year to join up with JustSayHi with the intention of creating the world's biggest, baddest free online dating site. Using these quizzes, I had a creative way to rank our site for competitive keywords in an industry that is primarily dominated by paid links, directory spam, and other greyish-black SEO tactics. We ranked #1 for online dating, free online dating, and numerous other very competitive terms. We were averaging over 2,000 new members a day and passed the 500,000 member mark.

Oops.
Shortly thereafter, we made a godzilla-turd-sized mistake. JustSayHi's parent company, Next Internet, acquired a bunch of payday loan and education lead-gen websites (around Q4 2007) which are among the hundreds of domains in their portfolio. They saw the success we were having with our SEO efforts and asked us to help promote a few of their sites. We started putting links to those sites instead of dating links in our quiz/widget HTML code. We soon ranked for competitive keywords such as "Cash Advance," "Payday Loans," and a few EDU lead generation terms. Our success led to Google receiving a number of spam complaints along with some unfavorable press in the Guardian that referred to me as genius/fiend. The consequence of all of this is that we were penalized by Google. We no longer ranked for "Free Online Dating" and other dating related keywords. In fact, we no longer even rank for very brand-specific keywords such as "JustSayHi". In short, we had been completely banned from search results.

As soon as we discovered that we had been penalized, we immediately filed a reconsideration request. Matt Cutts got involved in the case personally, but after a couple of emails, the penalty was not lifted. The basis for the penalty was:

• We cross-promoted other websites with our widget/quizzes on JustSayHi
• The other domains we promoted were in very spammy sectors and had duplicate content issues
• JustSayHi had some paid links/inclusions in our link profiles (these were prior to my arrival, but nonetheless are part of our history)
• Our reconsideration request was truthful but not as forthcoming as it might have been. We were asked to list all the spammy domains, and I only listed the two we had promoted with the quizzes, not the entire network which was owned by a separate company. In our defense, we knew very little about these domains (their history, how many there actually were, etc), but we should have done our homework.

There was no doubt that we'd screwed up royally - the question was what could we do about it. We couldn't ask everyone to take down those links, we couldn't undo the damage done to JustSayHi's reputation after dabbling in those spammy sectors, and we couldn't get reincluded in the search results.

A clean start
We decided it would be best to register a new domain and essentially start from scratch. This time, though, we'd be as 100% squeaky clean as we could and do our best to stay within Google's guidelines. We needed a new design anyway, so we figured we'd create a fresh brand and identity, a change which would be communicated to both our users and to the outside world as soon as the new site was ready. It would afford us the opportunity to improve the features of the site, as well as giving us a fresh start with Google.

We decided to create OnePlusYou (screenshot here)- an upgraded version of JustSayHi that we would migrate all of our users into. JustSayHi had been around for several years and by creating a new site our brand equity and domain age be lost, but it was better than not being ranked at all. The development and transition of OnePlusYou would take quite a bit of time, however, so prior to launching the OnePlusYou dating portal, we figured we'd get a head start on our link building. We launched a set of new widgets that included only links to OnePlusYou.com with the anchor text "Free Online Dating" and set out to repeat the success we enjoyed prior to JustSayHi getting penalized.

We truly believed this method of link-building was white-hat, provided we made an obvious note to our users that the widget contained a keyword-rich link (which they could optionally remove if they wished), and that keyword was relevant to our site. It had worked well in the past. Lots of other sites are successful with the same strategy and we thought Google had publicly given it the green light when they told the Guardian:

"Widgets that are distributed with a link back to the site that created the widget are fine," it says. "However, going a step further and selling links to third parties is against our quality guidelines. Sites that employ or distribute such widgets may risk losing rankings.

A few weeks later we heard word from Google regarding OnePlusYou, stating it was "the same off-topic widget tricks all over again on another site" and that our new site could suffer the same fate as JustSayHi.com. This was the first communication we'd heard from Google that adding a keyword-rich link from a widget to our own site was an ultra-mega-Google-NO-NO.

We promptly changed the links in our widget code from this:

Created by OnePlusYou - Free Online Dating

To this:

Created by OnePlusYou

We are striving to stay white hat with all of our efforts, but doing so requires that we are able to draw the line between white hat link bait -- which Google publicly encourages -- and a black hat, "off-topic widget trick." Is it white hat to add keyword-rich links to embeddable widget code? Is it only okay if those widgets are on-topic? In other words, could we use this method of link-building if the quizzes themselves were about online dating?

If that's the case, is ALL off-topic linkbaiting not ok? For instance, if I wrote a linkbait blog post that was featured on Digg or Reddit that had nothing to do with online dating but generated authoritative backlinks, is that against the guidelines? Where does Google draw the line? Jane touched on this shortly after the Guardian article came out with this post about search engines regulating linkbait.

We understand why we were penalized in the first place. We now recognize that our reconsideration request should have been more forthcoming. We have learned that Google considers the behavior of the site owner along with the particular site under review. On the other hand, there doesn't seem to be much we can do other than plead our case and pledge to be 100% whitehat in the future.

We don't know if there is a resolution to the JustSayHi penalty or what the likelihood is that OnePlusYou will be hit with a penalty when we launch. We have been holding off on launching OnePlusYou until we have clarity around our link-building tactics and whether the JustSayHi penalty is permanent. I ended up building more than 500,000 links using these quizzes and widgets, so I can't exactly issue a recall notice for all those bloggers and website owners to take them down.