Are visited links the same color as text risky?

Can it be interpreted as hidden links?

[Macguru]

Hi,

Some new Webdisigner challenge is presented to me. It is a technical site with lots of links to an impressive glossary.

Regular links are not decorated but the contrast in colour seems OK. I have a potential problem with visited links. Once a link is visited, it becomes just like the <p> tag. The site is using external CSS.

Any one heard of some bad luck because of this?

[shrirch]

Its risky from a design perspective. I personally dislike sites where I've got to move my mouse around and the only indication that there is a link is the change in the cursor.

[Dave_Hawley]

Why would you want to do this? I can only see this annoying a return visitor.

Dave

[berli]

If it's just the links to the glossary which return to text color, then I don't see any problem at all.

As a user, I wouldn't want terms I'd already read the definition to continue to be highlighted anyway. It's distracting.

And rest assured, Google couldn't care less.

[Macguru]

Oops!

It seems to be a little confusion here. Probably due to my original post. (speaks French)

I will try to make it clearer. One of my test sites got heavily penalised because of hidden text links using external CSS. To my knowlege, Googlebot himself never crawled the CSS file, but some widespread public spider did... So I am convincend that Google can spot and penalise a:link = <p>. But I am not sure it will do if a:visited = <p>...

The design idea is not mine, I will just promote the site. There is a important section of the site wich are content rich technical tutorials. We expect many returned visitors.

There are 3 kinds of links, each with his own set of a:link, a:hover and a:active colours. None of the links are underlined and the designer wants to revert all a:visited just like <p> to reduce "visual noise".

(~ 65 %)Internal links to the glossary wich open in a search engine friendly pop-up window
(~ 30 %)Internal links to other parts of the site wich behaves like regular links
(~ 05 %)External links to other sites wich open in a new window

The designer think it is a good way to tell visitors in advance what kind of window he will get by the colour of the link. I believe it will just add confusion for users, but I agree with him that putting a:visited in some shade of red really makes reading the mosaic difficult. Plus, I must stick to my role : promote the site and shut up on the rest. ;)

So, while design comments are welcomed, here is the question :

Can Google bust you if a:visited = <p> in an external CSS file?

[dougmcc1]

If users can't tell it's a link then basically it's a hidden link in my opinion. If I was Google I'd penalize for it.

I don't think they do though. A lot of webmasters just bold their links and there's nothing wrong with that even though no one knows the text is a link until they mouse over it.

[Net_Wizard]

A link is a link no matter what their properties is. Its only impact is to the users...how the users would respond to your links. Do they respond better with highlighted links or undecorated links. It's a design consideration.

Hidden links are of different criteria, as long as your links are visible for users to click, you're fine. In fact, I use the same technique for my Nav. Where the links are undecorated(no underline, no highlighting) which looks like ordinary text. But the fact that they are group into one area under an appropriate heading(ie; Menu), tell my users, in that area are choices therefore clickable(I do use 'hover' though).

Seriously, i doubt Google would be able to identify hidden links through CSS. If Goggle is going to penalize href with 'class=' or 'id=' then there would be a lot of innocent sites that would be caught in the crossfire. It's just not feasible. Unless of course Google can analyze your CSS file or somebody have reported you for hidden links.

Cheers

[dougmcc1]

Good points Net_Wizard. I was thinking of links in a paragraph which look like the rest of the text in that paragraph. If there is no indication to visitors that it's a link then why put it there?

Using links that look like regular text for your navigation is another story because visitors can make the assumption that it's your navigation and not more regular text.

Unless of course Google can analyze your CSS file

There have been some posts lately about Google accessing their CSS files and it's only a matter of time before Google has the capability to read them.

[Mikhail At Home]

I think that hiding visited links by default might not be a good idea.
What if more than one users works on the computer?
Or what if somebody read a definition but wants to see it again?

I would rather let user to choose wheather he wants to see links highlighted or not.

One of the ways to do that is to put two buttons on top of the page and link them to the following JavaScript:

function ChangeGlossaryLinkColor(newcolor)
{
for(i=0;(l=document.getElementsByTagName("A")[i]);i++)
if( l.href.match(/glossary/) )
l.style.color=newcolor;
}

This way you can flip colors any time and not worry about google snooping CSS.

Mikhail

[Net_Wizard]

>>I was thinking of links in a paragraph which look like the rest of the text in that paragraph. If there is no indication to visitors that it's a link then why put it there? <<

>>I think that hiding visited links by default might not be a good idea.
What if more than one users works on the computer?
Or what if somebody read a definition but wants to see it again? <<

That's the point..it's something a designer have to consider but far from being penalized by Google as hidden links.

It's really a tough call to determine what the intention of the site owner. As long as the anchors color is in contrast with the background and accessable(clickable,) it is not a hidden link whether it's practical or not is beside the point.

The only way for Google to programatically determine a CSS hidden link is to examine the colors of a:active¦visited¦etc and compare it to the container background color. It becomes harder if the site is complex with multiple background-color.

I doubt really, if this is practical for Google to pursue.

Cheers

[Dave_Hawley]

Hi Macguru

While Google would most likley penalize for a hidden
link(s) (same font color as backgroud) and doubt they would do so for a link the same color as normal text.

Dave

[nippi]

People do this so they can make key phrases in the page content into links, without making them appear as links.

if you sell "deep fried widgets" and had a paragrpah such as we sell the best southern deep fried widgets.... make "deep fried widgets" a link within this text, and use style sheets to make it look like normal text so it wasn't obvious to eitehr surfers/ or compeitors, that you were doing it.

You then get key words in your link text, and it may help with SER.

I don't think it will attract a penalty

[Small Website Guy]

It's very common for links in menus to not have the classic blue underlined look. People know it's a link based on the context that it's in a menu area.