Hiding links from SE's

How to do it....?

[Nick_W]

Hi everyone,

I need to link 2 sites quite heavily but wish to avoid possible penalties with the SE's. Is this how it's done?

<a href="http://www.the-site.com/" target="URL">http://www.the-site.com/</a>

Many thanks....

Nick

[Black Knight]

No. That doesn't do it.

First I need to explain something. Crawlers exist just to follow links. That is their sole task in life. If you have a link they can see then they will follow it. Period.

The proper to tell it that it isn't wanted is to use the Robots Exclusion Standard protocols. Either prevent indexing of the page the links are on (using the robots.txt file) or stop them following the links (but they still know they are there) using the robots META tag:
<META NAME="robots" CONTENT="nofollow">

That said, crawlers are not browsers. Most have limitations on what they can (or choose to) interpret.

Two of the things they generally don't interpret can be used to provide links to your human visitors that the crawlers won't (currently) follow.

1 Forms

2 JavaScript

But to all that I have to tell you the most important thing of all. If you don't want the links detected - don't include them. ALL tricks can be detected, and once detected the engine knows you're prepared to trick and deceive it to unfairly inflate rankings or prevent earnt penalties. That's a fast one way ticket to getting your domain or IP banned.

[Nick_W]

Thanks.

There is no trickery whatsoever. I have 2 sites that are part of the same company and related in content. I just need a 'our main site' link of part of one sites navigation. Useful to the users but a possible problem for SE's.

Do you know how to do the JS one?

Cheers

Nick

[Black Knight]

<script language="JavaScript" type="text/javascript">
<!--//start
document.write('<a href="http:\/\/www.example.com/">Link text<\/a>');
//end -->
</script>

Is the traditional - the whole link will be missing if Javascript is not enabled in the browser.

There is no trickery whatsoever.

You misunderstand. You want to include a link without actually including the link. To trick the spider into missing the link. That is a trick.

You'd actually be better off just linking to the page (especially if it is as you say just one link on one part of one page, etc. They are less likely to penalize that than they are to heavily penalize any detected trick.

Ammon Johns
Internet Marketing Consultant

[Nick_W]

Cheers I'll give it some thought.