Hiding Link Exchange: Can it be done with cloaking?

Some blog directories make you add one of their links into your site in exchange for listing your blog in their directory.
The problem I have with this is that their links are hideous and make my page look unprofessional.
I have only read generally what cloaking is, so I have a basic understanding. Emphasis on basic!

I guess what I want to do is hide the link from users, but show it to crawlers (assuming that's how they know it's on my site). Sort of like reverse cloaking I guess. Or, if possible, it would be best to hide it from Gs crawlers, and the users but allow the blog directory to see that it's on there.

Is this possible, any advice, helpful links, etc.?

You will have to show real users the blog recips because you need the blog recips to be visible to get approved at the blog dirs. You have no way of knowing what IPs the blog reviewers are going to be using so it's impossible to cloak for them.

Yes you can cloak for Googlebot and other SE spiders so you don't lose link juice to the blog dirs, and the links you get from the blog dirs appear to be one way.

Most blog dirs just need a simple link in the sidebar or blogroll. They probably won't care if you re-style it a bit, just as long as the link is there with their desired anchor text and it's not n0followed. Many blog dirs use a manual review for the initial review, but then after that they just send their bot around periodically to check that you've still got the recip up. You could hide your recips using CSS after you get approved, so surfers don't see them, but the blog dirs bots still see the recip links in the html.

or you could just blast your site with a directory submission tool and see what sticks - filter out all the crappy directories and you'd still hit over 500 in about 2 minutes.

Thanks for the responses.
Can you recommend a good blog directory submission tool?

Actually, you can hide the link exchange from a visitor but make it visible to whatever script/spider the link exchange uses... Just use an external CSS or JS file to hide the div the links are in by changing the div visiblity on load. This won't pass a manual review but it will pass any spider/bot that comes looking to verify the links.

A lot of them use scripts like the guy above said. If you want to hide it from users you can change the color of the text/hperlink to the same color as your background. I used to do that with wiki pages to sneak links.

I wouldn't do it. Really, I dont think there is any value at all doing this.

You considered the risk of negative seo compared to the tiny bit of tinyness a link from their site would do ?

Same color of text and background has been a cause of getting banned by Google for over 4 years now. I really wouldn't recommend it.
Also, from my personal experience, PHP directories that ask for a link back are mostly crap ones anyway.
I suggest you keep to a smaller amount of directories, manually picked and with high domain authority, and invest a little money in big directories with human reviews.