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While checking my backlinks, I found a website (not a competitor) who has a placed a link to my website on his homepage. Of course, I appreciate him doing so.
However, I am wondering just WHY he choosed to hide the link to my site (and at least 100 other sites - all on topic and covering the same industry) in a 1 pixel hight table that is not visible to the casual visitor.
This table turns his homepage into a 101 kb file, taking a while to completely load but obviously fully indexed by Google. And, Google is obviously giving credit (PR) to me from this hidden link (as it shows up in my backlinks).
He could have put all those links (perfectly credible, authoritive, third party websites) on a "recommended sites page" or something like that.
Obviously, he does not want his visitors to visit the sites he is secretly linking to. But then, WHY is he linking to those sites?
Am I missing something?
I just found the visitor tracker of the website in question.
Unique Visitors since June 19, 2002: 878 - no joke! an average of 3! unique visitors per day.
Guess the "smart" hidden link idea does not help ;-)
There are some people out there that just don't have the slighest idea of the risks they are taking by doing such dangerous things...
SEO
I've run into some weird things caused by different browser/system configurations.
Anyway, it's just a thought.
No matter wich browser, 1 is still a lonely number
However, I am wondering just why he choosed to hide the link to my site (and at least 100 other sites - all on topic and covering the same industry) in a 1 pixel hight table that is not visible to the casual visitor.
Part of any SE's algo that uses a link popularity factor looks at outbound links. If those links are focused and on theme, then there may be some additional weight given to the site with the outbounds links.
They are basically trying to look like a large on theme site by using this strategy. I'm not too certain that it works, but stuffing a hundred links back to back in a 1 pixel image has to be one of the easiest things to filter for.
I don't think any browser is able to make a table stuffed with at least 100 links (I did not bother to make an exact count) with a height of only 1 pixel (source code) visible.
But then, you may be right - you never know...
Might work for Teoma, but AFAIK not Google. My guess is he doesn't know what he is doing.
Never mind. :)
(Actually, I was wondering if maybe it was some sort of browser specific "trick" to get a table to choose optimal size. I haven't been up on table "tech" since I've been doing CSS for the last 6 mo.s and I was kind of out of the website game for a year or so before that. I know with CSS there are some pretty weird incompatibilities across browsers -- like dumbass IE assuming that your floating div should be "100%" unless you specify otherwise. Hey, MSIE, how the f*ck am I supposed to create elastic pages, then?!?)
