Forum Moderators: open
Before everyone leaps on me, this is something I don't intend to do. Indeed, with no sites currently to promote it would be of no use to me :)
However, if I am not much mistaken, then it is possible to place highly targeted keyword-heavy links, in bold, at the very top of a, say, PR8 page and, by specifying absolute position and giving negative numbers for the co-ordinates in an EXTERNAL .css file, (1)make them invisible and (2)guarantee that there is no way in which the spider will ever catch them.
To begin to crawl .css would create huge extra load for the spiders and is very unlikely.
The possibility of human intervention after a spam report aside (v. time intensive for SEs), does this not offer a worryingly safe opportunity for spammers?
Regards,
Alex Poole
<div id="sneaky">
<a href="blah.com">blah</a>
</div>
#sneak a {
display: none;
}
You'd have to be a bit simple to use this kind of cloaking technique though. It's easy to spot/report and just isn't worth the risk.
Nick
The impression I get from posts here and info elsewhere including their own spam report page is that they use spam reports more to "improve their algos" rather than send a slow expensive human being off to investigate each one.
Clearly improved algos are useless if you don't have the css source.
Its a little like driving without a licence I guess. Risky but 1000s of people do it all their lives and never get caught :)
No, I'm saying nothing of the sort. I think they have better things to do. I just think using css for cloaking is a little silly.
Nick
Craig
IP/UA is just types of cloaking. If a bot sees a page with a bunch of links on it and the user sees a page without those links: It's cloaked.
Nick
The CSS and SE's vs. spamming/cloaking etc. debate is still all theory Alex. Certainly if someone spots it (not too hard as Nick said) they could report it as spam.
What the SE's might do to the algo is totally different though, as there are reasons to use 'display: none;' for things other than spam.
It would be rather sad if my nice accessible site got banned ;-)
Nick
Also worryingly short term if you ask me...
our next design is unsing a 'Zeldman Externals' like feature in it's main navigation...
It'll be interesting to see what the SE's do for CSS, cause coding with it is sooo nice..
Looks like I do what you mention in the link, for the most part. I've been using CSS longer than SEOing, so as I got into SEO I started applying SEO logic with my CSS files....
I'll have to browse over more to your side of the WebmasterWorldorld, although I get enough CSS with the CSS-discuss mail list...
