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.