Have you used the Addthis Widget and had your rankings drop

[RodneyRiley]

Just wondering what experience people have of this widget? I added it to a site I look after late last week and we took an noise dive over the weekend. Any thoughts / comments are appreciated!

[activitysuper]

I find it actually works quite well, if I gain some facebook / twitter exposure it actually has a positive effect on rankings.

[SimonCullum]

Hi Rodney

There are two ways to look into this, Correlation and Causation.

Some Correlation seems to be there from what you've said, with the widget being added about the same time as your rankings dropped (though would likely need longer for the pages concerned to get re-crawled and any effect to be seen in the SERPS).

However I'd be extremely surprised if there was any Causation.  I've never experienced or heard of this particular AddThis widget or a similar social sharing widget to cause a websites' rankings to drop.

Likely nothing more than coincidence with the timing.

Have a look for any other correlations, check back over the past two or three weeks and if you've made any other changes or acquired any suspect links, look into those to see if they may have caused a drop in your rankings.

Hope that helps,

Regards

Simon

[EGOL]

I have it on several sites.  For most of them it has been there since AddThis was new.  We added it to a couple sites a few months ago.

No problems at all.

I think that it is a very good service.  We get lots of traffic back and some of our pages have received thousands of actions.