I am working on a term swimming pools for one my client and their competitors have use a lot of hidden link on their website along with some back hat technique.
But they still have not been punished. I have already sent this information to Google but nothing has been done, when will all this stop?

Google says to create pages for users and then when called on the fact that they are now advocating that we as webmasters do something just for the search engine the logic now goes that what they said was not meant to be taken literally. As if we are supposed to read and understand their intentions.

Google expects all of us to abide by their TOS except when it suits them to say that their TOS really does not mean what it says literally.

Google says that we are not supposed to use paid links on our web sites and that it would be good for us to help it know when we are using paid links through the nofollow tag while all along being the biggest single seller of paid links in existance today. That is nothing less than being hypocritical to the core. Expecting others to not do something that they themselves do every day.

Google says that we should not deal with links so as to raise our search engine ranking artificially through them. That we should wait upon the goodness of internet users to link to us naturally. While completely being ignorant of human nature and the very essence of marketing in general. That you do not sit around waiting for the world to discover you. As a business you go out and promote yourself through advertising. Paid advertising. The real world equivalent of paid links. Yet Google would have us pretend or take on the belief that paid links are some sort of special evil that becomes evil only because we are now advertising ourselves through said means on the internet as opposed to the real world.

I don’t know. Sometimes I wonder if Google exists in this vacuum of internet space where it has come to see itself as beyond reproach. Beyond logic. Beyond correction.

Perhaps it has become too big for it’s britches such that like most entities where that happens it just doesn’t see it. It has eyes but it doesn’t see. It has ears but it doesn’t hear. The only voice that it now listens to is it’s own. The only logic that it listens to is that which makes sense to itself.

As the saying goes power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Google is sliding down that slippery slope to complete arrogance it seems to me.

Carlos

I want to clear my doubt about hidden links. If I place links on my web page content with same css styling as of the normal content but have done some settings such that on mouse over of that link the text of the link changes the color enough to make sure its an hyper link and it navigates to the internal page of my website. Will it be considered as a hidden link? Will my website be affected bcoz of that?

Thanks
Ricky

How about if my home page was about golf and I had a paragraph of text on the home page, with an absolute url link disguised as text with the word golf. The idea here is not to deceive Google, but it would be to protect against scraper sites, or at least get some benefit from the scraper with a backlink to my site. However I don’t want to get banned for this?

Regards,

does this mean i can’t submit my site for indexing?

Of course most webmasters and novices for that matter(in my case) know the difference between actions to decieve or actions to improve presentation or secure some aspect of a site.

My competitors repeatedly copy my links pages, so my efforts are wasted and as far as search engines are concerned more and more junk pages are being created. So I took a drastic measure on one of my sites and put the bulk of the links pages in a “display none” element defined by CSS. For the visitor everyone can see the purpose of the page, that being to offer for them to add their link for the purposes we all want to get links!

The robots happy the visitors happy….how can that be deceptive? Its just trying to solve the problems the search engines create for us or put another optimize the opportunities the search engines provide us!

I think using certain web design techniques for common sense purposes is always going to be a fact of life, and I think search engine algorithams work this out well most of the time, I understand bounce rate is imprtant for search engines to? So I guess the algorithum takes that into account so no amount of bad link building practices can detract from the fact that a site is bing found in the correct keyword search phrase, otherwise that site would just keep getting bounced.