Site Widgets and SEO

admin — Mon, 24 Oct 2011 22:38:35 +0000

Site widgets and SEO:

The Short:

Content within an iframe is not part of that url, it is part of another url. And so a search engine will not be looking at the content of the iframe as an “on-page factor” for the parent url that holds an iframe. So if search engines can read it you lose control of keyword density and content of your site. If search engine can read it you get no value for it, so the only one who gets benefit is mypigeonforge.com. Also, the content could and probably would not be counted in your favor as search engines will probably classify it as duplicate content. This of course is taking into consideration that they give your site credit cor the content. So if you were to copy and past the content from the iframe directly on your site so you did get credit for it you will then for certain have issue with duplicate content.

What is Duplicate Content?

Duplicate content is content that appears on the Internet in more than one place. This is a problem because when there are more than one piece of identical content on the Internet, it is difficult for search engines to decide which version is more relevant to a given search query.

Three of the biggest issues with duplicate content include:

Search engines don’t know which version(s) to include/exclude from their indices
Search engines don’t know whether to direct the link metrics trust,authority,anchor text, link juice, etc.) to one page, or keep it separated between multiple versions
Search engines don’t know which version(s) to rank for query results

When duplicate content is present, site owners suffer rankings and traffic losses and search engines provide less relevant results.

The Details:

Recently MyPigeonForge.com asked businesses in Pigeon Forge to add a widget about local events. They claim this will boost SEO score for the sites it is posted on. This will boost mypigeonforge.com SEO but not so much the site it is posted on. If you post this on your site you will effect many aspects of SEO. You could affect your page size, keyword density , word count and much more ( if the search spider can read it ). The content from this widget and widgets like it takes away all your control of on site SEO for every page you place it on. However, mypigeonforge.com gets back links from related sites to help them with SEO. The other issue is you are linking to a site that if the user from your site clicks they are directed to a site with every competitor you have and can effect conversion.

The code they give you is an an iframe. If you are not familiar with iframes they are an HTML element is an individual component of an HTML document. HTML documents are composed of a tree of HTML elements and other nodes, such as text nodes. Each element can have attributes specified. Elements can also have content, including other elements and text. HTML elements represent semantics, or meaning. For example, the title element represents the title of the document. The iframe code will add very slight increase in load time ( page size ) to your site online some javascript based widgets.

Points to remember about iFrames:

The content in an iframe is not considered part of the parent page.
The page within an iframe may be spidered and indexed (or it may be not) but no PR is definitely passed.
A screen reader will normally turn the iFrame into a link to the source page (like Lynx) (unless they have a better alternative like text. Question is will the content feed have an adverse affect on your content and keyword density.
Links within the iframe element are accessible via the keyboard as if the content were within the web page containing the iframe.

What is the point of having any widget on a site?

The main goal for widgets, so far, is its viral effect in increasing traffic for the site the widget is for. But with the recent Facebook.com updates (allowing spiders to their members profile pages) and the increased use of widgets on social networks, it is important to build SEO friendly widgets. In other words to utilize widgets in link building. if you are going to have a Widget, you should get some SEO link benefit out of it, in addition to its viral benefit. With a facebook widget you get viral benefit, so facebook widgets are ok for your site.