do links like the one below count for SERP? <a href="website"></a> Code (markup): As you see the anchor text is missing. Thanks.
a link without the text is still a link...and sure they will count. Although in the example above I don't know if anything would even show up. your better off just putting the URL without the HTML
r u on drugs? can you show any reference on why a link without an anchor text will get someone banned from google? it is the over optimization that can get someone banned but a link without anchor text will NEVER get a site banned. this will be still a backlink and i suggest everyone using url links or links without anchor text as a mix so that the link building campaign looks more natural
What's invisble? The only thing wrong with that "Non Keyword Rich" "Non Anchor Text" link is that it won't get treated as a more useful "Anchor Text" link. It's a little bit like the "Click Here" useless links that give no info. Only in the case of a link that leads to a URL but has simply "Website" as it's "anchor text" you are gonna be relying on the domain.com/brilliant-keyword-url-structure to compensate.
They might count this link as an inbound link in their PR calculation for your URL... but it will NOT help you rank for any keyword phrase. The link text for inbound links is probably the MOST important ranking factor at most engines... They use it as a strong clue as to what the page is about... Without link text on your inbound links, you're just getting a little page rank.
The way search engine works is they give backlink credit for the anchor text towards the link on href attribute. Simple as that. Without the anchor text it would be counted as a backlink but for no keyword. Would it be penalized? I don't think so.
of course they work, and they account of at least 60% of real "natural" links given by choice. have you ever checked what links look like in Edu resource pages? student pages, some nasa pages, or just your regular guy joe sports fan-page ? a big percentage of those links will not have any anchors, does that ring a bell for you ?; building "naked" links from extremely relevant pages is one of the most guarded "SEO secrets". most people will just use only anchored links and then asks themselves why they are not having good rankings. well it doesn't work that way in the real world, in the real world, you get naked links, inner page links and random anchored links. people who succeed in the SEO world have just mastered the art of mimicing the natural patterns. good luck.
Any link from other website/ blogs pointing to your site could be counted as a backlink on the eye of search engines. But it would not definitely help your site on search engine ranking for any keywords you target.
Yes I believe it counts as it's a link to your site like every other one. It will not be as useful as a backlink with anchor text though but it'll still count.
Not sure as it wont show anything at all in the web page, so even if it is counted as a link then chances are your risking a ban from google for an invisble link. As the spiders that crawl a page only read the code anyway then I would expect it it count as a link, but I also expect you to get into trouble for it at some point due to it not showing up on the page through a browser. What are you actually trying to do anyway, why would you even want a link with nothing showing on the page? Read about hidden links http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=66353
Yes, iit will be counted as a backlink for the site. If you are working for ranking purpose then doing link without anchor text will not be helpful.