Hiding links with <div> tags?

Will this provoke a penalty?

[cwebb]

By using <div> and placing links outside of the document or under am existing image, will Google index those links?

Can Google detect that they are, in fact, hidden?

What if I write the negative coordinates into a css-file which I exclude per robots.txt?

[creative craig]

If Google doesn't pick it up and ban you a competitor might see it inform Google and then ban you anyway, its to risky in my opinion.

Craig

[cwebb]

Still, a spam report doesn't work very effectively and it's more: Google can read CSS files and could ignore the robots.txt and it would be quite easy to figure out when a text is placed outside of the browser window (lkess when hidden under a picture, though) but does Google ignore robots.txt for css-files?

They should know how much they get abused with that

[creative craig]

I am not sure on the CSS and robots.txt file front, but is it worth runing the risk?

If a site gets banned it may never get back into the index again!

Craig

[WindSun]

"Can Google detect that they are, in fact, hidden? .."

First of all, what makes you think they are hidden?

On one of our sites we have whole tables of links - inside a /div - and Google has never missed them that I can see.

My question is, why would you want to hide them from Google?

[cwebb]

You CAN make them hidden if you use the z-index to put a text-link under a picture or position them outside of the visible window using negative coordinates.

I read an article that stated "this works" and they're using it to hide a more descriptive text link under their logo.

Reading pictures is hard for a bot but the "hidden" text link could say "WidgetWorld - we sell the best and bluest widgets in the world" giving bots a link TEXT to use.