Oct 22, 2010
Hiding text or links in your content can cause your site to be perceived as untrustworthy since it presents information to search engines differently than to visitors. Google - Hidden text and links
Unfortunately the SEO Competition for QuadraCentifiable another competitor has just been found to be using hidden links (another..., yes you heard it right.)
Be warned, this competition is very public, and there are lots of people avidly looking at the strategies employed by each of the competitors. Or I certainly am, and I should hope that others are. Helps us remind ourselves and learn what works and what doesn't.
If you are found to be flouting the SEO Challenge rules, then you are likely to be potentially publicly outed, risk having the website that contains the hidden links removed from Google (your client would not be impressed), or you might decide to bow out of the competition rather than being publicly outed.
I found the latest via a Google alert. Didn't happen to be trying to find hidden links, they just popped out as obvious.
Linking is risky enough business as it is without using methods that can be manually submitted to Google spam reporting. The competition is meant to be showcasing the best that New Zealand has to offer, something that helps each of us improve the methods that we using for linking. Not to showcase black hat SEO!
This post is likely to stay and be as a reminder to others so we don't get a third or more engaging in such risky tactics.
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Comments
Aidan Rogers - Oct 26, 2010
Haven't really had the time to follow the comp... but really? Hidden links? I think that is funny :)
Michael Brandon - Oct 26, 2010
Worse than funny, its despicable!!!
If that is the standard of SEO that is around, then some clients are in poor hands.
I have just seen seoone.co.nz rise up the rankings in the last day. They will be in the top 3 at the end of the competition. I have seen a number of their article submissions, and I have known that they would rise up the rankings. Now that is an example of good SEO! We need more of these sort of people in the industry, ones that know how to properly rank websites.
Michael Brandon - Oct 26, 2010
It would be great if we could analyse the top 10 or even the top 20, and see 20 SEO consultants that were using linking strategies that had major parts able to be replicated for clients.
Then we could know that New Zealand businesses were in good hands when it comes to the linking strategies part of the SEO equation.
Aaron Dwyer - website backup - Nov 26, 2010
Talking about hidden links, all my sites that had Google Analytics installed just got deindexed due to malicous injected hidden spam links that were only visible to Google.
So I know all about the dangers of how Google feel about hidden links. Be prepared for reduced indexing or total deindexing.
Aaron