This actually a follow-up to my "lesson on surreptitiousness" and a more formal response to a comment by Hari of Hari's Corner. Hari said "…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."


What Google's ToS Actually Says

I extracted the relevant text. My article didn't say to do any of these things:

Text (such as excessive keywords) can be hidden in several ways, including:

  • Using white text on a white background
  • Including text behind an image
  • Using CSS to hide text
  • Setting the font size to 0

Hidden links are links that are intended to be crawled by Googlebot, but are unreadable to humans because:

  • The link consists of hidden text (for example, the text color and background color are identical).
  • CSS has been used to make tiny hyperlinks, as little as one pixel high.
  • The link is hidden in a small character - for example, a hyphen in the middle of a paragraph.

If your site is perceived to contain hidden text and links that are deceptive in intent, your site may be removed from the Google index, and will not appear in search results pages.

There's more information at the Webmaster Help Center, under "Hidden text and links" in case you want to read the whole thing for yourself.

It's About Accessibility and Perception

I'm not advocating hiding text and links the way Google describes. Making links look like ordinary text still makes the links accessible by plain text browsers, screen readers and anyone who turns CSS off in their browser. Doing it any other way is considered cloaking and used for things like keyword stuffing or presenting different text to the search engines than what's presented to the readers.

Perception is a pretty strong reason, however, to avoid hiding any links at all. What you and I may perceive as something legitimate may not be perceived by others in quite the same light. For that very reason, I advise extreme caution even when doing it the legitimate way. If you're planning to do it for a specific purpose, try to make it temporary.

I have some links that look like plain text in place and they're only there like that until the search engines completely index my new niche blogs. Once the indexing has taken place and the posts appear in search results, I plan to change them back into regular links or remove the links altogether.

Another good reason, as Steve of Pinnacle Trade Show Displays pointed out, to do links like this in the first place is to prevent competitors from seeing your anchor text. Once the anchor text has done its job, however, it would be advisable to turn the links back into regular links. Never give the competition any edge, even if that edge is reporting spam using undecorated links as an excuse.

Conclusion

When in doubt, don't do it. I've done it and others have done it, but you need to make sure you use your own judgment as to what's right and what's wrong.

Do you really think you'd get penalized for not decorating your links with different colors or underlines? Are links always meant to be clicked? I submit that links are used for indexing way more than clicking, even though they were never originally intended to be used that way.