I was thinking of putting some of my widgets on Widgetbox.com, but was told by someone that all of the widgets on there are in javascript - so that means i won't get a backlink from the sites that are using them. Does anyone know if this is the case? If you look at the one below - it certainly looks like there are links in there - but my contact is certain it wouldn't be counted. If this is the case and it's not counted - what is the point? http://www.widgetbox.com/widget/sanebull-commodities-and-futures
The joy of contributing to the community? Exposure? Pats on the back? It's not all about SEO you know. I looked at the source of just the page that you linked to and it's all encoded within javascript. Yuck. You don;t even get rank from their site. That sucks.
As you can see by the bolded text above, the ONLY site getting a backlink is widgetbox. They make sure that they get credit for 3 links in the <noscript> element.
Just read an interesting peice about Matt cuts saying Google has gotten better at reading Javascript: http://www.webpronews.com/topnews/2009/09/18/does-google-penalize-paid-links-in-javascript
Google has been reading and sometimes executing JavaScript for some time now for discovery purposes... But still... It's not going to help you get backlinks in this case. If you want to use widget distribution as a method of gaining backlinks then I would suggest that you host the widgetized code and distribute the widget wrapper containing your backlinks yourself. Zillow.com offers a mortgage calculator widget at http://www.zillow.com/webtools/widgets/MortgageCalculatorWidget.htm. An example of another site using this widget can be found here (about half way down in the right sidebar). Notice the calculator inputs, button, and output for the widget reside on a page on Zillow's site and gets iframed by the widget wrapper code. They wrap the iframe with a <div> in the widget wrapper code that contains several links back to various pages on their site. The outer <div> (including all of the links back to their site) actually get copied into the HTML of the various pages where the widgets get used. So they get credit for these links. The page that contains the calculator code itself (the one that is iframed) has no links. Here's the code that people download to use the widget on their site. Note the bolded links that they are getting from every site that uses the widget code:
No point! Don't do it. Stay away from the widgetbox. I just finished testing widgetbox on one of my environmental blogs (no, not the one from "recent blog" bit). I had it there for three weeks and having sent traffic to the Green Network, I've decided to stop. And here's why: 1. The Green Network is overrun with irrelevant stuff. Here's the best post picks from the recent week: Watch The Forgotten How to get most out of auction Watch Liverlpool vs whatever club it was plus loads of other footie rubbish Watch Human Target etc etc The ONLY remotely green post that there was: how a plain had killed a Tesla employee... that's very green, and very interesting 2. I've closely monitored a dozen of Green Network blogs that display this hapless widget. My posts never show up on any widget although I post regularly and bang on topic. Conclusion - don't give them free traffic and don't display their ads without getting anything back. However! If the widget really had displayed green stuff, I woulda kept it in place regardless of not getting anything out of it. That's what I thought. It looked like a great idea. Alas, too much footie, guys.