AddThis is a social media sharing toolbar that many websites use to let their visitors share information with social space. It’s small, easy to install & even has it’s own analytics feature. So why do I have a problem with it?

AddThiss Toolbar and the Offending Links

When checking the outbound links for some rather large sites, I noticed that clients who used the AddThis toolbar were linking through a followed link on every page to the www.addthis.com website. Which means, equity and trust built up by everypage theoretically gets passed through and lost.

AddThis Toolbar & SEO

I don’t personally believe in Google PageRank as a sold SEO metric, but look at AddThis.com its PR9 with a total of 418 Million backlinks, which is insane!

So what should you do? Either develop your own social sharing toolbar or use one that doesn’t link out on every page. For wordpress, I suggest using “Sexy Bookmarks”, it’s relatively lightweight and doesn’t link out to the mother site.

& that’s all I have to say about that :)

 

Related posts:

  1. Search and Social Media today and beyond – Guest Post on JyeSmith.com
  2. How Big is Social Media in the UK – Well, lets see…
  3. Generate A Social Media Strategy In 1 Second Flat!
  • http://twitter.com/jeremybrown Jeremy Brown

    I agree, be careful with backlinks. At 400+mill Google wouldn’t realistically be leaking page value unlike linking to say bigbrands.com.au

  • http://twitter.com/jeremybrown Jeremy Brown

    AddThis.com is PR9 & 418Mill backlinks, Disqus has PR8. Both great services that don't hurt SEO as much as the value they add

  • http://phill.co Phill

    Hey Jeremy, thanks for your thoughts :) I agree RE: discuss.

    However, is it not better to retain your link equity instead of letting it get sucked up by a social bookmarking site, especially a bookmarking site that doesn't even list bookmarks?

    Thats the point i'm making here about ensuring you're not linking out to places you are unaware of.

    I fully condone the integration of Social & SEO, in fact, I have some websites that have links generated only through social media and they do really well in search.

  • http://drinkingoatmealstout.com Justin Thorp

    Hey guys, it’s Justin from AddThis. I’m not super up on the latest and greatest for SEO so, I apologize if this is a silly question.

    When you’re saying AddThis is bad for SEO, you don’t mean that just by having a link AddThis that it’s going to necessarily make you plummet in search rankings. Right? Isn’t it impossible to show that kind of direct causal relationship? It’s just that, in general, willy nilly putting links on your pages to things that you don’t know wouldn’t be good. Right?

    I’d hope that the value that we’re able to provide to a page, would offset any loss and make feel people good about the linked endorsement. Granted I’m biased but I think we’ve been able to do things that drive more sharing and thus more traffic better than anyone else.

    We’ve done some preliminary research and seen that through sharing of your pages more links are created back to your site. All of that activity has actually increased SEO.

    Would love to hear more of your feedback. Thanks! :-)

    • http://www.gospiritual.net Jeyaprakash

      I am using a tool SEO doctor which I got as a firefox plugin to optimize the SEO of my page. I find adding addthis sharing tool reduces the page rank flow to a greater extent. I replaced it with addtoany toolbar which has improved the situation. There is nearly 20% difference.

  • http://twitter.com/meattle Jay Meattle

    Phill, Thank you so much for recommending SexyBookmarks! We put a lot of love into is at Shareaholic.

    • http://phill.co Phill

      Not a problem, just don’t go sneaking in any links in your pluggin and you’ll remain fine by me :)

  • http://phill.co Phill

    Hi Justin, thanks for your comments.

    Its not a silly question at all. I have used the addthis toolbar for a long time, but its only until recently I have decided not to use it.

    I didn’t claim that it would cause plummeting rankings, why would it lol? What I am saying though is some of the equity a webpage builds up leaks back to addthis.com through the 2 links in your toolbar, hence why your website is page rank 9 with 418million links……. there’s no other reason other than that.

    If I have a 100% equity and 5 links on a page, that equity is divided by 5, now if 2 of them are addthis.com then you get 40% of my equity, get it? On most sites the level of leakage may not be so bad given that some have 100 links on page, however for smaller ones it could quite serve.

    Indeed Social popularity is counted towards SEO, I don’t disagree with that in anyway. in a previous comment I mention how i am a massive advocate for Social & SEO integration, & believe me I do believe in sharing (see my guest post here: http://jyesmith.com/a-digital-perspective/phill-ohren-search-and-social-media-today-and-beyond/ ).

    My advice to you guys would be to remove the links, at worst add rel=”nofollow” to them because people aren’t aware they are linking to you. It is obvious you aren’t inserting dodgy links, i.e. keyword in link is “Social Media Toolbar”, but I think as one of the most widely used social toolbar creators you could lead by example.

    Feel free to ask any more questions if needs be.

  • http://www.webcreationuk.com/advancedseo.htm UK Advanced SEO

    Sexy Bookmarks is awesome! However, I am not 100% sure that AddThis is bad for seo…And yes, developing a tool like that literally might bring thousands of backlinks. ;)

  • http://www.telious.com Jain

    Hi , I agree 100% with Phill, I have done similiar analysis and addthis.com is connecting to many other sites, so crawlers identify the site as some spam sites.

    Jain Paul.
    Telious Technologies.

    • http://www.facebook.com/kenneth.rockmehiphop.roman Kenneth Roman

      Hi Jain, I understand this post is pretty old and its been a year since you posted the comment above ^. Do google crawlers still identy an X amount of sites as spam because of all the backlinks?

  • Alla

    Just want to say your article is striking. The clearness in your post is simply spectacular and i can take for granted you are an expert on this field. Well with your permission allow me to grab your rss feed to keep up to date with forthcoming post. Thanks a million and please keep up the effective work.

    _________________________
    SEO Armenia

  • Pingback: Don’t Use the AddThis Social Sharing Toolbar. It’s Bad for SEO | Phill « Daan Goor

  • http://heel-shoes.com heel shoes

    no, I don’t think so for that, because website must have link to out, cannot just link to internal page. that will makes google bot thinks the site is dead end on the word wide web and seldom visit. that will decrease the PR for the website. sometimes we link a outside website with higher PR is quite useful for SEO.Google like to visit such site. and the add this link is not a content relevant links, so will never hurt the keyword SERP

  • Mark

    Hi guys. I personally don’t know why users have extra toolbars. A Bookmarklet does the job just fine, is easier to install and use. AddThis and many other social bookmarking sites like Delicious, StumbleUpon, WebShare and WordPress use these but maybe i’m missing something. Are toolbars really worth the screenspace?

  • http://www.frederickwebpromotions.com LocalSEOConsultant

    Sound arguments against addthis, am rethinking my entire strategy now

    for me I chose the addthis toolbar and plug in over sharethis because addthis kept finding new social bookmarking sites and those new ones kept both me and my clients ranking – perhaps due to QDF or because I was an early adopter: remember that window of opportunity that was jumptags ? (for as long as it lasted anyway)

    The second reason I went with addthis was because of the running total of shares, it just made my clients website seem more attractive to new unique visitors (who wants to come to a party where only 4 people are there 3 of which are your cousins?)

    The third and least important reason was because the company was physically located in my back yard: I live near Washington DC

  • http://www.delovesto.com poddys

    Interesting discussion.  I currently use AddThis on my WordPress sites, but actually came searching to see how to “tweak” the MSIE toolbar for it, since in the last few weeks it has not only added icons for individual sharing sites, but now a drop down for Groupon.  Well at least it looks like that’s where Groupon has come to.  The AddThis toolbar now takes up almost a whole row on my browser, which I could do without, when just a single icon would suffice.
     
    I am going to take a look at Sexy Bookmarks anyhow, as well as to see if I can find an alternative sharing option for MSIE8.  I did use Share With Add To Any, but it doesn’t always work.

  • Sudarto

    I enjoy participating in this discussion. Because I am also AddThis toolbar user. But I do not know that AddThis did have a bad effect to SEO. I will continue to follow this discussion, and while the toolbar AddThis I will escape from my blog. What about the toolbar OnlyWire that many webmasters also recommended to use it? Thank you for the attention.

  • Pingback: Addthis Social Bookmarking Replacement Sharaholic | Local SEO And Google Places Ranking

  • http://www.frederickwebpromotions.com LocalSEOConsultant

    Hi Phil, I just removed Addthis from a half dozen of my blogs and installed Shareaholic’s Sexy Bookmarks
    unfortunately Sexy Bookmarks appears to also redirect Shareaholic (briefly) just before taking me to the social sharing site.

    It appears they both redirect away from our site, to their site, and then take us to the social bookmarking site.

    Now both of them keep a running total of our accumulated shares (which is a good thing for marketing purposes, it shows new visitors to our sites that a bunch of people before them thought enough of our post to share it), Perhaps they have to redirect to their server to keep track of the count… but I’m wondering if the redirection means our site did not “get the credit” for the “news”, Addthis or Shareaholic were credited with the “discovery”

    So Shareaholic might not be any better than Addthis for SEO purposes?

    What are your thoughts?

  • Anonymous

    Interesting discussion. I’m not quite familiar enough to throw my 2 cents in. 
    What are your thoughts on “Shareaholic”? Off subject: Just want to say, I really like that sliding pointer under your main menu, that’s very slick.

  • http://palimadra.tumblr.com/ Pali Madra

    Since the discussion happened some time back (nearly one and a half years) I wanted to know if there is an issue still when you use AddThis? I do not like to pass on my authority to AddThis. Honestly AddThis should have fixed this. 

  • Policythinkshop

    Would have been nice if you included how to unistall it!

  • http://fabiorocha.com.br/ Fabio Rocha

    Does this makes sense to SEO today? I like addthis but i dont like to loose SEO. :)