[suhail]

It's different: it's a recommendation of our product and it drives real clicks back to Mixpanel (excluding google). Powered by badges are extremely common and are more akin to an ad. The main difference is that Rapgenius' sole goal is to game Google, ours is not.

[pcooelt]

it's actually not - Matt Cutts specifically made a video about these exact type of "widget" links a few months ago. He recommended that they be no-followed.

[akshat]

Thanks. The main reason I ask is because I would like to do something similar with my product. However, after this fiasco, was skeptical about it.

If it is an ad, then it would definitely be safer to mark the link as nofollow as ads are not allowed to be links with SEO benefits.