Hide links from users but not Google - is it OK?

SashaPavelMisha

SashaPavelMisha

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Hi

i have a few old sites with communities of users of whom many are my friends and colleagues for 2 decades. Last few years I've been earning online and want to use these websites to link from index page to some of my other projects. But at the same time I don't want my friends to see the backlinks, while I'd like Google to see them and index them, if possible.

Would it be an acceptable practice to put links color of background or make them 100% transparent with CSS, this way users won't see them but Google should? And my friends will finally stop asking me why I "partner with these shady sites"...

What would you say? Would this be a violation of some rules from Google? I would do this already, but not sure maybe it will backfire negatively SEO wise.

thanks for your opinion
bye
 
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Don't do that. It could be considered as a form of spam

If you want to hide it from Ahrefs and other tools, that's fine. You can do it. I've done it with success.
 
i just wanna point out, i only want to hide links from website users because I am somewhat embarassed
otherwise I fully support indexing and crawling by any bots, i don't care about that, i'd rather all of those tools knew, why not?
 
Years ago, there used to be an "exploit" on the drupal platform that allowed you to hide invisible links in the comment forms. I ended up with tons of very high quality high PR links doing this, it skyrocketed by site to #2 for a rather competetive term. It stayed there for 2 weeks and after that I got wiped out the SERPs.

My point is, Google were wise to this kind of thing a long time ago, their crawlers will interpret CSS and JS to see if you're doing anything sneaky. So I would avoid this if possible.
 
You can show the links for users, but you can do following in .htaccess:
Drive bots to real sites;
Redirect users to google as example.
 
Checks date....
Sees that it is indeed 2022 and I haven't woken up in some kind of time warp...
 
agent-x said:
Checks date....
Sees that it is indeed 2022 and I haven't woken up in some kind of time warp...
Click to expand...
Hehe, I thought the same thing. Google has been banning sites for funny tricks like that for 15 years or so. So yeah, if you want to lose your site sooner or later - sure, go for it. But I guess you already knew that if it sounds like a bad idea - then it is a bad idea.
 
as i wrote in the top post, i've only been doing this for the last few years, so if this issue is as old as you say it is, nobody is talking about it anymore, and coming across opinions about it would be even harder, would it not?

in any case, i realize it's probably better to just hide these links from logged in users, which will minimize, if not completely eradicate questions..

thanks for all your opinions on this matter.
 
SashaPavelMisha said:
Hi

i have a few old sites with communities of users of whom many are my friends and colleagues for 2 decades. Last few years I've been earning online and want to use these websites to link from index page to some of my other projects. But at the same time I don't want my friends to see the backlinks, while I'd like Google to see them and index them, if possible.

Would it be an acceptable practice to put links color of background or make them 100% transparent with CSS, this way users won't see them but Google should? And my friends will finally stop asking me why I "partner with these shady sites"...

What would you say? Would this be a violation of some rules from Google? I would do this already, but not sure maybe it will backfire negatively SEO wise.

thanks for your opinion
bye
Click to expand...
This is what Google says:
Hiding text or links in your content to manipulate Google's search rankings can be seen as deceptive and is a violation of Google's Webmaster Guidelines
You take what you want from that. :)
 
Apart from Google's violation, the search engine looks into the site from the visitor's point of view. If you want to hide the links, Google understands that the link is not mandatory for visitors. So it may have possibilities not to index the page in natural way. I don't know how many people gonna agree with this.
 
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