Question

One of my clients wants to distribute a javascript widget that people can put on their websites. However he wants to ensure that the backlink is left intact (for SEO purposes and part of the price of using the widget). So the javascript he’s going to distribute might look like this:

<script id="my-script" src="http://example.com/widget-script.js"></script>
<div style='font-size:10px'><a href='http://www.example.com/backlinkpage.html'>
  Visit Exaxmple.com</a></div>

widget-script.js would display some html on the page. But what wew want to ensure is that some wiley webmaster doesn’t strip out the back link. If they do we might display a message like “widget installed incorrectly” or something. Any ideas / thoughts.

Some code taken from this question.

Answer 1

There’s no 100% way of preventing this, I’m afraid.

You could insert the link yourself with Javascript, but then it’d be for naught as far as PageRank goes.
You could give them the HTML with the link having an ID like mycompanybacklink and check with Javascript whether the element exists or not. If it doesn’t, don’t display the badge or whatever. If it does, you can verify that the link’s href is your website and its text is what you want. You would have to edit the HTML you posted as sample so that the link comes before the script, not after. The element could still exist, however, but be blocked by some other element or simply hidden with CSS. You could then also do something akin to what jQuery does now with its :hidden selector: Instead of looking at the CSS property by itself (which is what a webmaster is most likely to try) you can just see whether the element itself or its parents take up any space in the document. I think this is done with offsetWidth and offsetHeight but I am not sure. Worth looking into, though….