Hidden outbound links on homepage

[DXL]

I was looking at the site of a competitor that is the first result in Yahoo for our target keywords, and discovered that he has several links to other sites of his hidden at the bottom of his homepage (same color as the page background). His homepage only was only PR2, why would someone hide links when they could have just made a links page one click away from the index?

I guess you wouldn't get dropped for hiding outbound links (its not like they're keywords), but could that hurt the sites he's linking to if he gets discovered?

[ska_demon]

I guess you wouldn't get dropped for hiding outbound links (its not like they're keywords), but could that hurt the sites he's linking to if he gets discovered?

Hidden text and hidden links is a big no no. These people will get caught one day and will get penalised. If they are your competitor and you don't believe in karma you may consider filing a spam report.

Ska

[DXL]

Well his PR is low, and I just learned some new SEO hints recently, so I might see if I can't beat him sticking to White Hat SEO and not reporting him.

But again, it begs the question, will hiding outbound links affect his site rank, or simply the sites that he's linking to?

[pageoneresults]

But again, it begs the question, will hiding outbound links affect his site rank, or simply the sites that he's linking to?

Whether they or hidden or not doesn't affect the purpose of the links. Remember, this is strictly a visual thing and does not change the html coding for that link. So, to the spider, it is visible. And yes, the links will affect his rank as they naturally would. I don't believe the algo has reached a stage where it can determine a hidden link.

<added> See note below. I've made a correction to the above statement.

[edited by: pageoneresults at 11:30 pm (utc) on Jan. 5, 2006]

[SeanIM]

Seriously not worth attempting something like that, just focus on adding quality content to your site as often as possible (daily is best of course) and work your own backlinks. Give it a few months and with the right plan, you'll knock them out of the way. Hidden links are soooo 1999.

:thumbsup

[caveman]

This is probably the first time I've ever disagreed with anything that pageoneresults wrote ... (he's one of my heroes) ;-)

But in this case ... the SE's for ages have warned against hidden text including the kind where a webmaster keeps the text and bg colors close together.

Indeed, it's the first thing they note when in the "Quality Guidelines - Specific Recommendations" section of this page [google.com]:
- Avoid hidden text or hidden links.

Now, just because they warn against things doesn't mean that they are able to deal with them [the folks at the SE's are pretty sneaky you know, and do occasionally employ disinformation tactics, I think ;-) ], but I've always been under the impression that it's a relatively simple matter to determine if a text color is too close to a BG color.

If I'm wrong, I'd sure like to know it.

FWIW, I do often see pages ranking well that use the similar color on color technique, so maybe the SE's are less good at finding it than I thought.

Personally, I wouldn't do it, if for no other reason than in a hand check, you're gonna be toast. Plus, I don't do that sorta thing anyway. ;-)

POR, thoughts?

[pageoneresults]

POR, thoughts?

My fault. I was reading another topic at the time where the discussion centered around links that were barely visible and not underlined.

I need to retract a little of the above. If the links are hidden using same color as background or a color close to that, there may be an automated penalty to contend with.

Want to test how close you can come? If you are running Google AdSense, you can see what happens when certain ad colors get too close to other ad colors and don't provide enough contrast. Google won't let you do it. ;)

I don't condone the hiding of anything, it is not necessary and so 90s. Plus, you end up being the topic of discussion as various fora. And, you can be assured that there plenty of people rushing to the search quality report form. ;)

P.S. There are other ways of hiding links that the algo cannot determine. That is what I was thinking when I wrote the previous reply. I need to start verifying my comments before I get myself in trouble. ;)

[caveman]

Thanks POR, thought I was slipping. ;-)

Agree too, that there are other ways. Not that I use or condone them.