Google Bans Websites With These Sidebar Widgets

Google remind webmasters about the unnatural links in the sidebars and in the other areas of the site that just pass the link juice to the directed ones. Google has warned webmaster about the unnatural linking in the past which resulted in the banning of several sites that participated in the widget baiting, blog spamming and link exchanging.

This action taken by Google had made it clear that it won’t be tolerating the manipulating links to the websites that manipulate the search engine rankings.

We're distrusting some links to your site. We often take this action when we see a site that is mostly good but might have some spammy or artificial links pointing to it (widgetbait, paid links, blog spam, guestbook spam, excessive article directory submissions, excessive link exchanges, other types of linkspam, etc.) – Google about spammy backlinks back in 2012.

If you had taken proper actions before Google by removing the links from your sites, you are the luckiest one. But Google now taken it more seriously and announced that it will ban the sites that either be linked from sidebar widgets or provide links to.

That means those who are getting inbound links from the widgets of websites and those who are giving these links from the widgets on their sites will be eligible for penalization. The widgets that credit the developer and his/her website with a hyperlink at the bottom are the ones you should be watchful about.

Widgets like mutual content advertisers (the ones that are a trend these days to promote one another’s blog posts on each other’s blog.), counters, video Ad snippets from 3rd-party widgets and other kind of widget scripts from freelancers are coming with the crediting links in the bottom in very tiny fonts. Though these look unharmful, these might become the reason for penalization of your site.

How to tackle with these kind of widgets?

There are 3 ways to tackle these kind of widgets. They are simple and mutually exclusive to one another. These methods are as prescribed by the Google web spam team itself.

1. Make the crediting hyperlinks at the bottom of the widget a ‘nofollow’. Adding rel=’nofollow’ will make them neutral and pulls you back on to the safe shore.

2. Remove the links entirely from your site to stay out of the banning list.

3. If you cannot control the neutralizing or removing of credit links from your side as a webmaster, just remove the entire widget.

If you had already get any warning message in your webmaster console, submit your reconsideration request to Google after taking the any of the above actions.

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