I’m working on a project where we’re putting together a search tool widget for external partner sites.
The project hasn’t been completed, but the search will likely need to be managed through a script to be able to externally modify it down the road in regards to text, design, and search options.
Currently it’s setup to link back to our site, but my concern is that the script snippet method will disallow any SEO benefit, since there won’t be static HTML when it renders on the external site.
I’m not building the widget, but this is the way I currently understand the issue. Has anyone tackled this before?
That’s how things tend to work. There’s no SEO benefit from most widgets. Two things some widget providers do to try to gain some backlinks are
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In the code you hand out to embed the widget, include a link above or below the widget styled to match. If the end user doesn’t delete the link, it’ll be a normal HTML link they paste into their page. You won’t have control over modifying the link in the future.
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Including a link in <noscript> tags after the <script> tags for the widget. I know Google does follow links in noscript tags, and if you use some unique anchor text you can find those links in search, but I don’t know if there’s any kind of weight modifier – I can’t say if the links are treated the same as other links on a page.