Today I will talk about how to make a hidden link . I suggest a fairly simple way to insert a hidden link, not that this is the best option, but this is how I placed several links on third-party sites in the hope of getting a profit. I propose to hide the link in the text or code of the site through CSS, as well as speculate about the possible SEO effect of placing such hidden links.
I must say right away that there are several opinions on this matter. There are many examples, both positive and not so good. The question of the effectiveness of such links can be considered very controversial. In any case, the goal is to transfer weight from the pages of the donor site to your acceptor site with all the consequences. I think there is no need to explain that links are made hidden to hide the very fact of their existence for the site owner, or simply for aesthetic purposes.
Next, I propose a link code that can be placed on any site, in any area between the BODY tags:
your_anchor
A link with this CSS style will not be rendered visually. According to the cascading rules, the style set directly inside the tag has the highest precedence, so any other CSS rules that may apply to this tag will be overridden. From the point of view of performance, you can hide a link in HTML in different ways, you can use my method, or choose any other. Much more important is not the fact of placing hidden links, but the effect of them. Now that you know how to make a sneaky link, it's time to talk about the SEO effect.
What are hidden links?
Now about my experiment. A year later, completely disillusioned with this technique, I removed all such links! They did not cause any harm to my sites, but there was no benefit either, so I decided not to risk it. Maybe in vain. All donor sites were trusted and themed as far as I understand the meaning of these SEO terms. Personally, my experience has shown the following results: links got into the Google PS index, period! I did not get any effect like the growth of the TIC or the increase in the positions of the pages to which the links with characteristic anchors led. Maybe your experience will be different, who knows?
Such links are often placed in ready-made templates for various content management systems . Such "charged" templates (themes) offer free download and installation on the engine of your site. The creator of the template or his partners count on a powerful effect, not taking into account the quality (usually low) and the subject of the sites that will host his themes and links along with them.
You can easily track such links, there are many services and techniques for this, but this is a topic for a separate article. In any case, this threatens you with spamming of external links, which is often fraught with serious negative consequences for the site. And the receiving party is threatened either with a profit in the form of an increased TIC, or with sanctions from search engines for low-quality links or banal search spam. Such links can be cross-cutting and bring maximum effect. But do not forget the basic postulates of the PS about the quality of the site. Manipulating from the realm of gray or black hat SEO is a dangerous path.
However, links hidden from the eyes of site visitors are even recommended by some link aggregators or link buying / selling exchanges. It is more correct to say that they are not recommended, but are declared equivalent to ordinary links. The main thing is not to learn how to make hidden links, but to make them work!