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On Friday, I broke the news that Google changed their link schemes guidelines on widget links. In short, they made a change that explicitly named what types of links within widgets were bad and that not all links within widgets are bad.
Google also made two smaller modifications to the link schemes document, which seemed very small, so I didn't cover them.
Truth is, even the widget topic was probably not worth covering because it makes no difference to Google's guidelines. Yes, it appears different but it was just a wording change to clarify what Google's stance was. Their practice didn't change - they only penalized sites with "keyword-rich, hidden or low-quality links" not all links within widgets.
How do I know this? Well, if you trust Matt Cutts, Google's head of search spam. He tweeted later in the day:
Thx to @dannysullivan for pointing out that we could clarify our stance on links embedded in widgets: http://t.co/038YpFwyPj
— Matt Cutts (@mattcutts) January 10, 2014The reason the change was made to the guidelines page was to clarify the language after Danny Sullivan pointed out the confusion on the page to Matt and his team.
So again, nothing changed in practice but on paper it did.
Forum discussion at Twitter.
