Comments on: Hidden links

By: Aaron

Aaron — Thu, 22 Sep 2011 01:57:07 +0000

Matt- Let me give you a normal website owner’s perspective here. 2 years ago I contemplated buying links or participating in link schemes. However, I wanted to “do the right thing” and now, in one of my small medical markets, I have watched my competitors fly right by me to number 1 2 and 3 in the index because they “did” buy links. You can look at the links and tell right off. When I compare my site to theirs, It is obviously better optimized, the product is better and cheaper, it’s just plain better (from even a non bias perspective) (totally obvious). However, I have remained lost somewhere below page 3 because I did not buy links like my competitors a year ago. Buying links sure is paying off for them! Doing the “right thing” is a bummer…

By: Faaris

Faaris — Sat, 27 Aug 2011 11:49:25 +0000

Have been noticing hidden links in div codes on some sites lately. So looked it up and found thispage page on SEOMOZ.org which explains this perfectly.

The best explanation of it is given in the following mini discussion in the comments section:

geoklix | February 23rd, 2008
Interesting, I just viewed the source and did not locate the div/links. I think s/he may I have 2 instances of this page on the server and is running a cron job to rotate these pages (clean and the one with hidden links). Thanks for sharing!

richardbaxterseo | February 23rd, 2008
Totally – that’s why i ran the screenshots. Rotating / user agent / ip detection maybe too. We had a theory that if you visit the live page from outside of google’s ip range, you don’t get the divs!

Mike_Peak | March 7th, 2008
If you visit the page using the firefox user agent switcher and set up to browse the site as Googlebot, you get the hidden links. So for at least one example (pennystocksshares.co.uk/companies/9999.html) they are serving Google a different page. I have visited that page as a normal user and the links were not in the source, and as googlebot they were.

darkSEO | March 10th, 2008
That’s the whole point! If Google sees the links, it doesn’t matter if noone else does. More link juice, better rankings. This is actually quite a basic spamming technique. I can’t believe the size of the network who are exploiting such a simple hack. Come one google, give us a challenge at least!

Now my question is this: I have a list of almost 4,000 such URLs which have active links hidden in the source code in this manner. (I have reported them to Google and I am hoping that something might be done about them). When will we see the next animal named update which checks and eliminates the benefits derived from such links?

Thanks

By: Erik

Erik — Tue, 23 Aug 2011 20:14:20 +0000

Matt….I know I’m late to the party in regards to this post……but if I had 5 paragraphs of content and wanted to link to another page, so I use inline CSS to make the text appear like everything else on the page, but for business purposes didn’t want the user to leave the page till there was a conversion made (lead gen), is that a no-no. Thanks

By: David Thomas Marquardt

David Thomas Marquardt — Tue, 28 Jun 2011 17:32:02 +0000

Its funny what some people will do with their time. If they spent it doing something good they would get further ahead.

By: Vova

Vova — Wed, 13 Apr 2011 13:54:50 +0000

I had 300 good natural links to my site from different sites.
Somebody has hacked other sites 2 days ago (checked via Google Cache) and now Yahoo Site Explorer shows 600 links. I’ve checked new links – they all are in the same hidden div block in the middle of content but with style (position:absolute; top:-100px) – similar to those you describe in the post.

I’m afraid that Google may penalize my site for these links. I’m already contacting webmasters of these sites asking to remove these links.
Is it possible to give Google a notice that these links are not mine so it could just skip them not penalizing my site?

By: Elan

Elan — Fri, 04 Mar 2011 22:46:20 +0000

Rather old post, but somehow I found in none-the-less. What would be the point of hiding that link in that paragraph, like the example? What would the person gain from this? I assume that if the person had the ability to add that code, then they own the website, so why not just put the link there and not hide it?

Great blog, thanks for sharing the knowledge.

By: Amitav Roy

Amitav Roy — Tue, 04 Jan 2011 18:41:25 +0000

Ha ha ha… some people have so much time to come up with such nice tricks to hide the links… but sometimes it wonders me how advanced google crawling system is… one heck of a system man. You can do a lot to hide… but you are still going to get caught
Like the famous quote “You can run, but you can’t hide”.
Thanks for the example.

By: Muhammad Abdul Basit

Muhammad Abdul Basit — Mon, 03 Jan 2011 12:34:21 +0000

Several times I have seen web designers and developers leaving old code commented. Although that text or link or even a style is not visible on a page. But, will it still be considered as a hidden link or hidden text? Keeping in mind that designer or developer has not done it to make hidden, he just have done it for his reference.

By: Richard

Richard — Mon, 15 Nov 2010 22:44:37 +0000

Hi Matt,
I’m interested in the dialog you had with Bill Platt (who commented previously) regarding hidden links in text. I’ve always known that internal linking is a great way to get search traffic and improve user experience because it allows a site owner to use links to tell Google what he believes is his preferred landing page for a particular topic. However, we all know that there are battles between the search optimizers and the writers/designers, who don’t want their carefully designed content (font styles included) to end up looking like Wikipedia. If we use text-decoration:none along with altering the default anchor tag font color and text size to blend into our design, can that get us penalized? We’re not trying to fool anyone regarding our links. We just want our site to look clean. If you could comment on whether we should steer clear of “hiding” links this way, I’d appreciate it.

By: Amit

Amit — Mon, 12 Apr 2010 02:58:29 +0000

He he he,
he did a lot of research on just hiding the link. But all in vain.
You still caught that. Any ways, I happen to stumble upon a website where the site looked fine, but the person had a lot of text in his code and then he commented.

Not sure if it helps. There was a javascript effect which I was looking for in his website, when I found that he had almost 100 keywords in his html code and then commented.

Wonder if that helps him… (I have to try, but don’t think it will help)