Widget Linkbaiting

An interesting topic was posted yesterday by the self proclaimed World's Greatest SEO aka Darren Slatten on Widgets as linkbait. Matt Cutts said some interesting stuff in the interview with Eric Enge, but as usual the answers were, when analyzed, rather bland and really what he was saying was go back and read Google's webmaster guidelines. Save yourself even more time by simply following the only really important Google suggestion on this topic:

"Does this help my users? Would I do this if search engines didn't exist?"

I love the elegance, simplicity and yet huge capacity for failing in this. Google is saying we should really KNOW whether what we are doing is ethical, and perhaps most of us do. It's not possible, however, to accurately measure your own standards of ethics next to Google's of course!