Inserting a Skype call button or Skype call link on your website is easy and a free way to communicate with people around the globe. The problem with Skype call links is that SEO reports and search engines don’t always like them. They report that they are broken links (404) because of an undefined syntax in the url.

The reason behind this is simple. When you create a link using href=”yourlink” without prepending http:// or https:// you are essentially telling the browser that the link is relative to the website or current directory. Therefore, the Skype link will be translated to the browser as http://domain.tld/skype:yourname?call. Obviously this isn’t a valid link.

In order the get around this you have two options.

The first option would be to make the create a Skype link as follows:

<a href="skype:yourname?call" rel="nofollow"></a>

The problem with this option is that you are using nofollow. When using nofollow on external links it’s not bad at all because you’re telling search engines that you don’t want to be associated with the site. Remember however that the search engines possibly see this link as being from your own domain. Telling search engines that we don’t want to follow an internal link is essentially saying that you don’t trust your own link, which is not good. Therefore, we don’t want to use this approach unless absolutely necessary.

The second approach is more preferable for SEO purposes. We will use javascript to create the link. There’s a couple ways to do this, we can use the button provided to us from Skype, a local button image or we can use a CSS sprite.

When using a CSS sprite we’ll implement this bit of JS:

<script type="text/javascript">     
     document.write('<a class=\"your css sprite class\" href=\"skype:yourname?call\" target=\"_blank\">');
     document.write('<\/a>');
</script>

When using a local button we’ll implement this bit of JS:

<script type="text/javascript">
document.write('<a href=\"skype:yourname?call\">');
document.write('alt=\"Skype Me!\" width=\"100\" src=\"http:\/\/domain.tld\/directory\/image.png\" height=\"50\" \/>');
document.write('<\/a>');
</script>

And lastly when using the button from Skype we’ll implement this bit of JS:

<script type="text/javascript">
document.write('<a href=\"skype:yourname?call\">');
document.write('<img style=\"BORDER-RIGHT: medium none; BORDER-TOP: medium none; BORDER-LEFT: medium none; BORDER-BOTTOM: medium none\" ');
document.write('alt=\"Skype Me™!\" width=\"124\" src=\"http:\/\/download.skype.com\/share\/skypebuttons\/buttons\/call_blue_white_124x52.png\" height=\"52\" \/>');
document.write('<\/a>');
</script>

And for one last, final way of doing this, we could always append the html using jQuery.

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