Comments on: Hidden links

By: UK Job Search

UK Job Search — Thu, 29 Oct 2009 00:13:14 +0000

What about links in a div where it’s CSS is set as display:none and is in a CSS file?
Would Google pick that up?

By: Mark

Mark — Sat, 03 Oct 2009 01:58:56 +0000

I know that several other article directories have been through this problem with hidden links. I found this from The articleSnatch blog as they are trying to get back into Google’s good graces. Thanks so much Matt as it is these tips that I hope will keep us out of the dog house on teh fron tend versus trying to figure out what happened like AS is trying to do at the moment.

By: dan

dan — Tue, 22 Sep 2009 08:08:37 +0000

What about links from your own home page to your own home page, but links that are disguised in a paragraph of text as text, which are intended to get a link back from scraper sites? Protecting yourself from scraper sites in a way, but not distracting the user.

By: seogoat

seogoat — Tue, 22 Sep 2009 04:40:56 +0000

Hi Matt,

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,

By: dert

dert — Wed, 19 Aug 2009 07:45:19 +0000

i have a website in which i’ve posted hidden links and hidden text in page sources etc. just for fun (kind of like website easter eggs). trust me there are NO pornsite links

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

By: jules

jules — Thu, 30 Jul 2009 07:31:02 +0000

Im confused about this hidden link hidden text stuff.

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.

By: Bibokz

Bibokz — Tue, 30 Jun 2009 08:36:57 +0000

I guess its a plain an simple to all the link builder out there.

By: Erick Barney

Erick Barney — Fri, 29 May 2009 18:18:10 +0000

Matt, we use CSS and we have white text on background graphics in our nav, so the text is definitely not hidden. We seem to be experiencing some sort of Google penalty and are having trouble figuring it out. We’ve always practiced legitimacy with SEO. We’re wondering if it’s possible that we’re getting flagged for hidden text.

By: Hellas

Hellas — Mon, 27 Apr 2009 14:35:39 +0000

What about this situation?

I have in my site title and it stand on the top of the content.
Then I decide to add image logo through the css, but then my is extra, I dont need it anymore, but I want that my site name stay in h1.

So i wrap it in a div and make that div to be display:none;

So that code is visible in the code but it is not visible for the people.
Would that be considered as a spam by Google?

By: Nate

Nate — Fri, 24 Apr 2009 15:07:54 +0000

The question of hidden text on a page keeps coming up for me right now. Of course, I understand that using hidden text to inject your page with a million keywords is frowned upon, but what if the hidden text is valid content that should be crawled by a search engine? The example in mind is a web comic. Obviously, Google can’t scrape the text out of the jpg/gif of the comic, but that content is certainly useful and should be searchable. I can put this text in a hidden tag above the image so that search engines can identify it as the most important part of that page, and no keywords are injected to increase search hits. Is this also frowned upon even though the use seems completely legit? Placing the entire body of text from the image on the page in visible format is redundant and ugly.