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!

This I find interesting. You can see on the right (hopefully) the link to my MySpace page using the anchor text "internet idiocy". Just checked it an low & behold, my MySpace page comes up number 2 on Google for that search keyword. That's "achieved" (and bare in mind I don't give a monkeys wheer my awful MySpace page is in SERPS) a number two result for what I don't think is an unreasonable serach query. The only thing that's beating it is the internetidiocy.com domain and I don't fancy trying to beat that - a lot of work and no real benefit.

Some people have suggested anchor text isn't as important as it once was. Here's the proof of the pudding - I can tell you the destination page doesn't contain either word, so that ONE link using that anchor text achieved the page one Google result all by itself. This whole SEO thing is starting to get interesting (at least, I think so). Check my previous post on a page one result (nothing to do with anchor text) here:

http://www.tomcatuk.net/2007/04/ive-never-really-believed-use-of-h1-tag.html