McVicker - 12:50 pm on Mar 24, 2005 (gmt 0)

We publish a magazine and sell content for a living. The content is valuable. It's a lot of work, and we expect to be compensated for producing it. This causes a big SEO problem: to promote the magazine we need decent rankings, and to get rankings you need to post content. But for us, posting free content is not an option. It's the same as "giving it away for free."

Here's an idea that was recently proposed: Keep the main site lean and focused on subscription sales. From the main site we could post invisible (ie. transparent) image map links that would lead to significant content pages. The idea is that the googlebot would think that we have a lot of content on the site, but the normal visitor would never see it.

By the way, posting sample "teaser" articles doesn't work. We've tested this repeatedly and each time the visitor gets his "belly full" without subscribing. And why not? If you can get it for free why pay for it? We've also tried posting content that is partially obscured so the visitor can't read it. This has just pissed them off. Obviously, an argry visitor isn't what we want.

Anyway, what do you think about the invisible links idea? Would it work? Is there a downside?

Thanks for your feedback.