How to Avoid Promoting your Competitors Gadgets on iGoogle

When you promote your Google gadget, you may also be unintentionally promoting your competitors gadgets as well.

Google wants to provide suggestions to their users of other gadgets they might enjoy. The problem this may cause for you is that those “other” gadgets may just well be your competitors. Here is a way to keep Google from showing your competitors gadgets during promotion. Let’s look at one of the places that Google suggests other gadgets and see how to get around this problem.

1) Google gadget directory description:

In this example, the gadget description page for a Travelocity gadget is shown. On this page Google suggests other gadgets from Expedia, Kayak, etc. and therefore promotes Travelocity’s competitors.

To avoid this you can choose not to send people to the gadget description and instead use the “add to Google” option instead. If you do then you won’t be sending your customers to this page and they will therefore never see Googles suggested gadgets.

The “Add to Google” page shows only the gadget sceenshot and the description that you wrote of your gadget:

Here is the “add to Google” page for the Travelocity gadget, this page can be displayed for any gadget by adding the gadget xml file location to the end of a google url. Here is the url for the travelocity one:

“http://www.google.com/ig/adde?moduleurl=http://www.labpixies.com/campaigns/travelocity/travelocity.xml”

Don’t let the length of the url scare you, just replace the location of your gadget.

If your gadget is at “http://www.example.com/gadget.xml” then the add to Google url would look like this:

http://www.google.com/ig/adde?moduleurl=http://www.example.com/gadget.xml

By sending your customers to the add to Google page for your gadget rather than you gadget description page, you can easily avoid promoting your competitors.

My next article will show you how to avoid doing this in another place within iGoogle, the canvas page.

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iGoogle Gadgets – Open Social Compatibility
How to Create, Distribute, and Promote iGoogle Tabs
Google Gadgets, iGoogle, and Some Numbers You Might Have Missed