RSS Feeds: A Quick Lesson in Website Surreptitiousness
Instead of heading off to bed like I should, I decided to stay up for a few minutes longer to pass on a trick that you may or may not have thought of. I also wanted an opportunity to use "surreptitiousness". I love that word and every variation of it. It means "obtained, done, made, etc., by stealth; secret or unauthorized; clandestine". In my case, it would be a case of "stealth blogging".
Stealth Links
Whether you're familiar with custom style sheets (CSS) or not, you can accomplish this spectacular feat of surreptitiousness and no one, unless they hover their mouse over every single word in every single post, would be able to find your stealth links.
You don't have to modify your style sheet. You just need to use an inline style with your links. In my case, since my links already don't have any decoration (no underline), all I have to do is change the color to match the rest of the text.
In your case, you may have to turn the text decoration off as well. It's this simple:
<a style="text-decoration:none;color:#000" href="http://example.com/" title="Example">Example</a>
Of course, you need to use YOUR color, not mine. You can also throw the target attribute in there if you're using XHTML transitional versus strict.
Why Use Stealth Links?
One purpose would be to do a lot of link clustering without making the posts look incredibly spammy to the casual observers. (Hover over "link clustering" to see what I'm talking about.)
Another purpose would be to embed external links to other sites and blogs that you don't want people clicking on. In some of my posts, I have surreptitiously embedded a few links to two niche sites I've already made live. I want the search engines to follow the links, not you.
When NOT to Use Stealth Links
This is only my opinion. I have no hard facts of any kind to back it up. I wouldn't hide paid links because the infamous Googlebot would pick them up. Someone from Google's spam team might stop by to investigate, in which case they'll probably de-index your whole site because something fishy looks like it's going on.
I also wouldn't hide links where I've added the "nofollow" attribute to them (usually commercial sites that could be misconstrued as paid links). In the eyes of Google, paid links are bad news. Tread softly when you put them in.
Final Thoughts
I wrote way more than I intended. I was simply passing on something that I'll probably forget to write about later on. Did you find it useful? Let me know whether you did or not or even if you already knew and think I'm a schmuck for even bringing it up. Anyway, I'm off to bed.
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Ah ha!
I actually did this on a site a while back because I didn't want competitors to see the keyword anchor I was using. It's a good thing to have in the bag.
RT wrote: "I have surreptitiously embedded a few links to two niche sites I've already made live" Damn, I want to know what those niches are… do I now have to go back and re-read all those posts and mouse over everything, or is this just a trick to get us to re-read those posts! Hmmmm… :wink:
With over 1200 posts, you'd be reading a really long, long time. :twisted:
Paid or unpaid, sponsored or otherwise, any content that is hidden from readers but available to search engine crawlers is considered "cloaking" by google according to their ToS and would be considered spamming their search engine. I've definitely read this in google's ToS a while back and I doubt if they would have changed their stance on it since then.
The reason of course is that they don't want their search results "poisoned" by keywords or phrases which readers cannot see and thus lead to seemingly irrelevant search results. It doesn't matter for this purpose whether the content is "sponsored" or not.
So if you were concerned about google ranks and such, I think it would be wise to avoid such techniques.
hari’s last blog post… The ingredients of good humour
After rereading the TOS (thanks a lot, Hari), and determining what kind of cloaking they were talking about, I can say that this fits the letter but not the intent. Cloaking involves hiding the links from visitors completely and making them visible to the search engines only. The method I'm talking about doesn't really hide them — they're there in front of your face — it just doesn't make them different from the other text. Anyone using a plain text browser can see them (like Lynx).
The cloaking they're emphasizing… well, it's not this.
Very clever. Where do you put that line of code you mentioned, in your post?
Speaking of google, I am showing PR : n/a for your site. ?!?
When putting in a link, silly. By the way, I have a PR of 5. Are you having connection problems or were you just looking at this page. Because this page won't be ranked for a while.
Hi
This is very cool – now is there perhaps even a possibility to suppress the mouse pointer icon change? Perhaps with JavaScript?
Thanks for sharing this!
Mike
My latest blog post: Fotokalender “Elements†2009
Here are very nice fotokalender and wandkalender online.
They used META-Tags alot ;)