Widget Best Practices In a Google World

I am not a SEO but I have picked up a few things in the last 5 years or so. Its now 2008... Reciprocal links are not supposed to work, profiles/referrals, signatures, and other old tricks have been fingerprinted and discounted or the site owners are no longer passing page rank in those areas. Whats a new site to do.. Can't buy links or reviews =( You can make a viral widget that will get you a ton of links but then I hear they ban those too? Not so fast. While there has been a lot of talk lately about dangers of gaining too many links to fast and issues when all your same anchor text is the same I can tell you from experience I have never had a problem. I have also never had 1 site banned for widgets. Here is the thing with widgets Google hates (from my experiences). They know just like you do that nobody is going to read the full source code in that box and so they are clearly not making an editorial decision and deciding they want to give you link juice. You should always be able to easily defend your site if a Google engineer should want to nuke it. The only problem is your side of the argument is often made on your site. So I will show you a real life example of something I have done. - Lets take the mclovin id maker for instance. Basically it makes a mclovin id for you... simple... then it gives you the code so you can put it on your site or your myspace. But it also tells you that by placing the code you will be linking to my site: As you can see its CLEARLY labeled that by adding the image to the persons site they are linking back to the site also. The mclovin site specifically has a ton of links all with the same anchor text and it ranks very well. #1 for mclovin id maker and pretty good for just "mclovin" which their is actually a lot of search volume for.