Yahoo Goes Viral with a Link Badge Widget
So they predict that 2007 is the year of the Widget. MyBlogLog has been a big hit so far. Now Yahoo, after acquiring the primary widget preferred by thousands of bloggers, has gone the next step to create a nifty little widget that allows users to see how many incoming links their website has from Yahoo’s Site Explorer.
The Badge, which Yahoo calls it, is Javascript code that appears to dynamically update itself with the number of incoming links to a particular page or site from Yahoo’s search engine. With just the installation of the code, individuals can see how many inbound links point to a particular website or web page instead of having to perform the research by hand. How cool would it be if there were widgets for every link statistic publicly available to help publishers easily determine the location of their weak points — from just a quick glance?
Not sure about the value of such a badge, but I am sure that Yahoo’s development team is myopic when it comes to how people use the Web.
First, they only offer that badge using Javascript. They just cut out all the MySpace users, lots of hosted blogs and everyone that hates adding Javascript to a page. I’m one of those people that hates adding script to a page and out of thrity or so sites I run I have three sites that I can’t add JS to.
Want to send them some feedback from the ‘link badge’ page? Clicking the link takes you to some Digg style voting page on which there’s nothing about link badges.
Oh wait, there’s another feedback link. Clicking that must take you to the feedback form. Well, it might, if you were logged in to your Yahoo account.
And with the recent reports about people removing the MyBlogWidget because of the slow load times or other errors, how long before the ‘link badge’ starts adding seconds to page load times?
Hey DG –
I understand your frustration, and though there are always incompatibility issues (with just about every sort of script out there), this still scores the nice “cute little widget” factor by me. It may not have value to everyone, but I think it’s a nifty little tool and beats other widgets/applications out there.
I know a lot of people removed the MyBlogLog widget, but I also know that that the issue was quickly addressed by the MyBlogLog team. I think you can’t really beat that.
Honestly, I agree with DG here. People don’t want to clutter their sites load time with a JS widget that may not be totally effective.
I’d rather take the high road and research the statistics myself, assuming that the Widget may not be as accurate as it is perceived.
Overall, great to note this new tool, and surely we can look out for Yahoo to advance it in the near future.
I think everyone agrees that it’s not a great value to the SEO community, and this is more of a “viral tool” for the widget hungry.
I definitely see the viral potential within that community.
I love it. I will get the widget myself and put it to my blogs.Thanks