WidgetBucks Deserves another Post
Make Money Online | October 22nd, 2007 | 3 CommentsYou probably remember my last widgetbucks to make money online post where I blogged about WidgetBucks and how it works. Well on that post I had the pleasure that someone from the WidgetBucks staff passed by, Mr. Dean Jutilla.
D. Jutilla was kind enough and he passed by again to explain some things and let us know that more categories and ad sizes are going to be implemented with WidgetBucks. Well they still don’t give us the freedom to know more about our referrals as Googlelady mentioned (but I personally would care less, but others do care).
At that same moment when the article was published and the discussion was going on unfortunately something crossed out of my mind to ask, but a day later I dropped an email to Dean Jutilla (to the email he had used to comment) and here is what the email i sent to Dean.
Hello Dean,
I am taking this freedom to drop you an email since you saw you were very kind and open
to suggestions as far as it regards the WidgetBucks.There is something I actually did not like about WidgetBucks since the very beginning but
some how it slipped of of my mind to write on my blog post about WidgetBucks
(http://www.dnseo.net/widgetbucks-make-money-online/).I have notice that every user when creates a widget from his panel he gets his code
automatically created and all what he/she has to do is copy and paste that code into
their site. For many tech savvy website holders everything looks just okey and it would
be even okey for those that have frames on their website (to a certain point).But since awhile now, Google search engine has taken a hit on noscript tags since they
tend to hide those links from visitors but spiders can still read them. It would be the
same as placing links on the site and hiding them with CSS text indent.My question is, since widgetbucks wants to or at least tends to become a closer
competitor to AdSense (well, bidvertiser pretty much sucks) with your beautiful widgets
and the new ad system, don’t you think it would be smart to not harm your customers with
those hidden noscript links?Having those hidden links will in first place harm your customers that use your widget,
but in the long run, when many will notice they are getting a penalization because of the
hidden links people will start removing widgetbucks, and removing the noscript links at
that point it would be too late for Mpire’s WidgetBucks.Honestly, i don’t believe widgetbucks.com needs to play nasty that way, it has already
received a decent amount of buzz from press and bloggers, but in any case, I would more
like to hear what you can tell me about this.Kindly,
Astrit Kita.
That email was sent Friday 19th October, ever since I have not received a reply from Dean but there was a reply on the other side. I checked the WidgetBucks code I use on another site and the one i use here on SEO Optimization and there was no track of that nifty noscript but…if that makes you feel safe with Google than you are most probably wrong.
On the MP3 Player Review site more than 50% of the ads are using WidgetBucks and since i saw that the noscript tag was removed and instead they were using a div for a second I thought ok…well done, they finally worked out. Yeah crap. I checked the site with Lynx web browser, which is basically a text browser that does not display images in a site but rather only text (very similar to HOW spiders see your site). Well the results show that spiders can still see that nifty hidden link. (How to check: Go to http://www.delorie.com/web/lynxview.html and write down the URL http://www.mp3playerreviews.net in the bar since I have already verified the site and see the results)
What I can do about that? Well, almost nothing, I could chose between
- a). Remove the WidgetBucks Widget
- b). Be nifty like them and add a rel=”nofollow” tag next to their link
Would they get mad for the nofollow tag? I care the less, it would be a much bigger problem If i got banned from Google search engine than not being able to use WidgetBucks.
Now I would like to have that same pleasure again and see what Mr. Dean Jutilla has to say in regard to this, will they decide to act correct with customers or they will remain backlink hungry as they are now (and they have had a heap of press by now without the need of those hidden links).
Hey Astrit,
Thanks for linking to Googlelady. I would like to say that there are many people that don’t care about referral those that directly add the widgetbucks ads on their site (those that have a niche blog/site that will work with widgetbucks) but as Googlelady will not work with widgetbucks becuase the obvious reason (niche) so I care about the referrals that I got. Knowing more about the referral we (those that promote widgetbucks) via referral can know which “campaigns” works and which not.
A great point Googlelady,
That way they can cover even those webmasters that don’t have a niche site but would like to make some extra bucks with affiliates.
What I am more worried about are these hidden links.
[…] us (the SEO Optimization readers) thats nothing new since I first discussed the widgetbucks hidden links and who followed the comments of the PageRank horning knows even better. To be honest, i did not […]