A new method of hiding links from SE?

tiny image in link text.

[Lorel]

Whenever I'm looking for sites to submit to I always check anything that looks suspicious so I can detect sites that are somehow hiding their links from search engines.

I found the following that looks suspicious (a tiny image in the link text) but I'm not sure what's going on here. I checked the code and there is a class for css file but only font changes.

Could something in the code below cause the link to not be followed?

<a href='http://www.somesite.com/'>some site<img src='/img/go.png' alt='(Go)' /></a>

[bird]

No, it's the other way round. This link will likely get overlooked by humans, but spiders will follow it. That translates to a "hidden link" and is highly frowned upon by the SEs.

[jdMorgan]

Not sure why they'd do this. The image is not associated with an onclick or mousedown, etc. JavaScript event, so it's not an exit-tracker. About the only thing that image does is loosely distiguish between a 'bot fetching the page you found it on and a browser fetching that page -- and that's assuming that the browser's user has not disabled image downloads. The Alt text isn't any good as far a keyword-stuffing goes, either, unless they want to rank for the word "Go".

Maybe there's an alternate stylesheet for mobile phone/WAP devices, and that image becomes the preferred place to click or something.

Whatever it is, it's not obviously useful, but it should not stop the link from being indexed. You might want to check out that page using Firefox and the user-agent switcher extension or use a similar approach, cloaking yourself as a valid Googlebot user-agent, and see if anything changes.

Jim

[Lorel]

Hi Bird,

The name of the site is in the link also so I don't think that could be considered hidden text.

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Hi JdMorgan,

I saw only one stylesheet on the page.

I found and downloaded the user-agent switcher extension and found instructions to set it for googlebot and checked the page with it. I don't see anything different but I don't know enough about this tool yet to make sure it's working.

If anyone knows of a site that is cloacking that I can check out please sticky me the url.

[anchordesk]

What's the difference between that HTML and the following:

<a href='http://www.somesite.com/'>some site</a><br><a href='http://www.somesite.com/'><img src='/img/go.png' alt='(Go)' /></a>

They both accomplish the same thing ... some hyperlinked text and a hyperlinked image. I do it at times on a homepage for featured products ... customer clicks on either the image or the text, they get the product page. In this case, the user clicks on the text hyperlink or the "Go" image. He's making his site look unique.

I see nothing suspicious with that bit of HTML.

[Lorel]

Anchordesk,

The point is this is a directory listing businesses so the link should go to the business website, which it does in this case--I'm just curious as to why the image was included. The image is inside the link text area but appears to have no useful purpose--it is only about 1/32th of an inch in size and doesn't say or indicate anything.

Sometimes directories scrape the content and set up a new page with a 302 redirect to the business who listed the site (stealing PR) but there is no redirect on this link (that I can see).

I have seen this tiny image elsewhere since I posted this message, including on the site where you go for information about the user agent, but it's not coded the same way as mentioned above.

[LeChuck]

Deleted.