We built a widget in-house and released it to our consumers earlier this year.  This was our first widget so we pushed it as much as possible with a small level of apprehension due it being our first voyage in the world of widgets.

Since we developed the widget in-house we were able to add a static backlink at the bottom of the widget that would help our SEO efforts.  Users and webmasters are able to edit the code and remove the link if they choose to, but it appears as though most are leaving the link with the widget.  Each page online that shows the widget will also display a backlink to our site.

Today I checked the big three, Google / Yahoo / MSN, to see how many pages displaying our widget are indexed.

• Google = 4 pages indexed
• Yahoo = 20,600 pages indexed
• MSN = 2,047 pages indexed

What the hell is going on with Google?  A knee jerk reaction from some would be to ask if the widget was placed on low PR, low authority (in other words crap) pages, but that isn’t the case.  Due to the helpful nature of the widgets they’re being picked up and display on sites like MSNBC.com and a lot of local news station websites from around the country.

I got the numbers above by checking the string “powered by domain.com” in each, with quotes.  What’s interesting is that if I search for “powered by” domain.com, with the domain portion outside of the quotes, there are thousands of additional sites displaying the widget that show up in Google.  If Google has the pages indexed why wouldn’t it return them for the direct query?