Comments on: Link to Authorities and Hide These Links With CSS

By: Step 1: Get 1 Million Myspace Friends.

Step 1: Get 1 Million Myspace Friends. — Mon, 01 Jan 2007 23:59:44 +0000

[...] Myspace strips off the word Javascript, so he just split the word ‘JavaScript’ into two lines in his CSS. oojee covered something similar in the comment section of SEOblackhat here. [...]

By: e

Sun, 28 May 2006 18:07:20 +0000

out bound loinks = no page rank reduction? i was looking at a few sites which shuold have a higher pr than they do, take for example google news. pr5, but maybe tahts because they dont havec any real content, just a few outbound links. anyone else can verify this?

By: Dennis Cutter

Dennis Cutter — Fri, 24 Mar 2006 22:29:31 +0000

I have a variation on the hidden text using CSS. I created an entry in my site CSS that has the position commands in it. This way you can make a very normal looking span statement and the text is invisable to human eyes but very visable to the search engines. I also put a lot of spaces before the postion statement to push it out of sight just in case someone downloads my CSSS file. I no longer use it but I still think it’s a very neat way to hide text.

.Arial8ptd {font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 8pt; color: #CCCCCC; position:absolute;top:0px;left:0px;width:200px;height:200px;visibility:hidden}

By: Wikipedia Eats Google Part II : Graywolf’s SEO Blog

Wikipedia Eats Google Part II : Graywolf’s SEO Blog — Sat, 31 Dec 2005 04:26:47 +0000

[...] I was tipped off to Wikipedia Eats Google, through Steve Rubel’s Wikipedia all over Google. One his main proving points is this special query over at Google [* *] which is intresting, and this is the authors line of reasoning: Google is becoming increasingly prone to Wikipedia. This is because Google’s PageRanktm algorithm, the method by which it ranks search pages, inherently succumbs to the basic structure and social structure of wikis. The PageRank algorithm is most famously characterized as valuing links that are highly referred to by other people. It seems that is only part of the story. The PageRank algorithm values links to yourself more. That is, a website that has many pages and is densely inter-woven with links becomes a sort of PageRank machine. True, without other websites conferring a little bit of their PageRank onto it, that website will not have a high PageRank, but given enough of a small number of external links from mediocre websites pointing to your very large, densely interwoven website, your website will shoot up through the listings. However in true Freakonomics (no aff) style I’m going to say the author misses a big part of the equation. There have been many back and forth debates over whether linking out to unique, and authoritative web documents help your rankings (see Hilltop Analysis), however I can tell you I’m a firm believer in the concept, as are many other SEO’s. In fact many who practice the dark arts also link to authority websites. As a result of Google’s Sandbox filter I can tell you my site building skills have improved dramatically. I can crank out websites with hundreds of empty pages waiting for copy in a few days. Now if I were a true button pushing spammer I’d be filling these with scraped and uniquified content, and I’d certainly be linking to authority websites like Wikipedia, to make my site appear more “hub like” and rise in the rankings. [...]

By: Naked Welshman » Black Hat…hiding links in CSS

Naked Welshman » Black Hat…hiding links in CSS — Sun, 11 Sep 2005 19:43:59 +0000

[...] Interesting stuff from the world of Blackhat SEO…we all knew it but didn’t think to use it in part…I suppose [...]

By: tpiddy

tpiddy — Fri, 09 Sep 2005 19:12:28 +0000

or for something a little more gray, make your links identical to the text arround it, no text decoration, no weighting.

By: oojee

oojee — Fri, 09 Sep 2005 06:02:03 +0000

I wouldn’t bother obfuscating your js, if one day the bots learn to parse js they’ll have a parser built in so obfuscated code will be just like normal.

if they are doing lazy checking (looking for keywords within a js file) then just build up the hidden as a series of strings.

eg. s=”h”
s+=”i”
s+=”d”
s+=”d”
s+=”e”
s+=”n”
alert(”you wanted: “+s)

By: hermen shermen

hermen shermen — Fri, 09 Sep 2005 03:55:43 +0000

oh yeah … a good trick too… use javascript to make a div id hidden. your css files will be clean.

can anyone recommend a tool to make the JS hard to read by an engine?

By: hermen shermen

hermen shermen — Fri, 09 Sep 2005 03:53:33 +0000

with absolute positioning you have nothing to worry about if you want to place it somewhere visible but out of the way … altough getting it to work with a footer that isn’t always in the exact same position is a bit tough.

serve bots a 404 not found on the css file …oooh … wicked indeed.

you could just overlap an image over it as well.

By: tpiddy

tpiddy — Fri, 09 Sep 2005 02:48:54 +0000

it seems to me that disallowing your css in your robots.txt is a bit obvious, and could itself be cause for reducing the relevence of a page. i am not sure if google or other search engines are this aware the practice, but rest assured they will become so.

i do not know how much the search engines parse css attributes, but it would seem plausible if they had access to the css file, they could identify links that are visibility: hidden or negative positions like top: -10000px.

a better solution may be to have your css served by a script which serves the search engine spiders(or anything that is not a popular browser) different css files. or maybe even serve bots a 404 not found on the css file.