Blekko Offers New Linkroll Widget & More Publisher Tools

Mar 4, 2011 at 9:00am ET by Matt McGee

blekko-linkroll Blekko has expanded its publisher/marketer outreach with two new tools and a dedicated Blekkogear page for those and other publisher offerings.

One of the new tools is the Live Link Roll (shown at right as a screenshot), which is a widget that displays a site’s most recent inbound links “as they happen in realtime,” Blekko says. The Blekkogear page includes a widget building tool that generates a piece of iframe code for embedding on any website or blog. Site owners can include inbound links to multiple domains (or sub-domains) and customize the size and number of links to display. Blekko’s announcement today is promoting the Live Link Roll widget as a way for site owners to be transparent about the quality of their inbound links (although that’s not something site owners have any control over).

Another new tool is an embeddable search box that lets site owners offer general Blekko search, or a “slashed” Blekko search on their websites. Other existing tools are also on the Blekkogear page, including the Blekko toolbar. There’s even a free t-shirt offer — although, oddly, the shirt is black, not transparent. (Sorry, couldn’t resist….)

Blekko previously made a lot of friends in the search marketing industry by offering some interesting SEO data about any site in its index.

Related Topics: Blekko | Channel: Consumer

About The Author: Matt McGee is Editor-In-Chief of Search Engine Land. His news career includes time spent in TV, radio, and print journalism. His web career continues to include a small number of SEO and social media consulting clients, as well as regular speaking engagements at marketing events around the U.S. He blogs at Small Business Search Marketing and can be found on Twitter at @MattMcGee and/or on Google Plus. You can read Matt's disclosures on his personal blog. See more articles by Matt McGee

Connect with the author via: Email | Twitter | Google+ | LinkedIn

http://www.justinblase.com/ justinblase

Looks like a cool widget. Initially I have 3 thoughts:

1. With the transparency that comes along with displaying the widget, I suppose including the widget on your site could be viewed as a “trust factor” by search engines (at least for Blekko)

2. It looks like it would be easy to drop some links from shady areas of the web that make users of this widget squirm.

3. If it catches on and sites start using it, it could be another nice tactic for reverse engineering a competitor’s inbound link strategy.