After so many reactions in the blogosphere, if WidgetBucks hadn’t reacted to it, they would have got slapped by the bloggers too. So, they made a pretty good decision today and updated their code. But, it is really funny the way they reacted. They don’t want their publishers to know the truth. I got this mail from them today :
One of the concerns we’ve heard from many of you has been the slow loading times of our widgets. We really appreciate your feedback and comments in helping us improve in this area. So, today we addressed this issue by rolling out new code that ultimately delivers faster loading widgets.
But, in reality if you check the new code, you’ll notice that everything remains the same. But, only the Text Link has been removed. But, still i’m in a dilemma whether to use WidgetBucks because even their new code contains “hidden text”. That is against Google as well. I don’t know what Google’s reaction might be to this move of WidgetBucks. But, i’m definitely going to wait for sometime before continuing to use WidgetBucks.
Let us clarify. The code change today implements the Akamai content delivery network (CDN) for the delivery of all static content (i.e. .swf, .js, and .css). This allows these elements to be loaded from Akamai’s massive “edge” presence rather than our Seattle-based colocation facilities – this offloads traffic from our web servers and greatly increases load speed for the ad content. You will notice that the old path (www.widgetbucks.com) was updated to reflect the new path (images.widgetbucks.com) which is a CNAME mapping to the Akamai network.
The removal of the back-link was simply based on publisher feedback about not being allowed to modify the HTML to place a “no-follow” for SEO purposes – rather than grant permission to modify the HTML we provide, we simply removed the backlink. That back-link, by the way, was never maliciously placed there – if you do not have the Flash Player installed, then we wanted to show a link to WidgetBucks, plain and simple. Hope this clarifies.
Hi Greg,
It does seem logical that you need to link to WidgetBucks, if the user doesn’t have Flash player. But, this is against Google’s Webmaster Guidelines. Isn’t it ?
I am sure that widget bucks will be at the top of Google serps in a short while. They have fix the issue on their end.
Glad to know that… But how ?
Thanks, no WidgetBucks for me, thats for sure…
Regards,
Roboblob