101 Articles Hidden Links
HIDDEN LINKS AND TEXTS
Hidden text came into existence much before Google came into the search engine world. When search engines started gaining popularity in mid 1990s, lots of aggressive SEOs started using methods for tricking the search engines and gaining traffic. There are many types of hidden text. The most common method used is the same color background and same color font. When we make the color of the background and the color of the font similar, it is not visible to the end website user. When people visit a website they cannot view the hidden text unless the text has been highlighted using mouse or some other method. Aggressive SEOs use this method to hide text because search engines can read them. Content plays an important role in judging the quality of a website / web page and some SEOs abuse it to their own benefit by hiding them.
Hidden text can also be hidden on alt tags, Noscript tags, No embed tags and no frames tag. Some clever people try to hide text behind images. Users will see only image but the search engines will see the text hidden behind the image. This is an old tactic still used in some sites. Check this screenshot of a website using image to hide the text behind it (istockvanities.com). Like hidden text we have people that abuse the search engines by hiding links. Hidden links are again a very old strategy which still works. It is still into practice because it is very difficult for the search engines to differentiate whether the links are hidden or visible. Now people can adjust their font color in CSS, JS files etc. Most JS files are not crawled by search engines. They failed to detect the same color fonts which make it difficult to detect hidden text.
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Images |
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Screen Shots |
Example
The image depicts various hidden links added in the website in order to manipulate the search engine rankings. The links hidden in the source code, redirects the users to irrelevant and spammy sites. This is pure search engine manipulation tactic.
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Flash/ Interactive stuffs |
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Source code |
See how the word "mission" has a little box around it? It's a hidden link. If you view the source of the page, here's what you'll see. The relevant link is highlighted:
The verdict: This method works for all users, though it requires extra CSS markup to make it work.
The method for this approach is somewhat involved, taking advantage of CSS properties.
The following code should appear in the style sheet:
#skip a, #skip a:hover, #skip a:visited
{
position:absolute;
left:0px;
top:-500px;
width:1px;
height:1px;
overflow:hidden;
}
#skip a:active, #skip a:focus
{
position:static;
width:auto;
height:auto;
}
The CSS id should then be referenced from within the element tag:
This technique is explained in more detail in the CSS section "CSS in Action: Invisible Content Just for Screen Reader Users."
The following is an excerpt of hidden code on a .org site with a Google PageRank of 5, SEOMoz Domain Authority of 49 with 18,000+ backlinks.
These are the least offensive four out of over 1,000 links that were added to this page within a DIV layer which means you wouldn't be able to see the links displayed on the website, but they are on their for search engines to see.
Even though they are not displayed on the site, they are still contributing to a bad neighborhood which goes to show that just because a toolbar gives them high authority a ranking doesn't mean it is a great site to be listed on.
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Working Examples |
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References |
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Other sites that refer to the same manipulation tactic are as follows |
