A couple weeks ago we posted how Google's John Mueller said he would avoid link building in general, but in that, he said you can enable people to easily link to you by offering a widget or something.
John was asked about widgets for link building in the Tuesday hangout on Google+ where he said he'd avoid some of the widget link building efforts as well.
But even bigger news, John said that they should be "publishing fairly soon" a "cleaned up" version of the guidelines around widgets and link building.
The question was:
I see well known sites using widgets to generate keyword rich backlinks via publishers. The guidelines aren't 100% clear on providing widgets with defaulted backlinks. What is Google's official stance on widgets with embedded keywords on "follow" links?
The answer was:
This is something I try to avoid. I think we have cleaned up the guidelines a little bit or we might be publishing fairly soon to kind of make this a little bit clearer on what we kind of expect here.
Google last updated their link schemes page to add widgets back in January 2014. We know Matt Cutts back in 2013 suggested widget links to be nofollowed just in case.
Here is the video where at 51:22 John goes at this question:
Forum discussion at Google+.
