Probaby this has been asked before but I'm going to ask it again. Is it wrong to have your anchor text and links in your body text the same color and size etc as the rest of the text so that a link looks like normal text?
YES thats wrong the purpose of a link is to be seen as a link to enable ppl to CLICK on a link to view that next page or do you expect ALL visitors to move over all text line by line to find links ? no reasonable person ever would do so the classic color in www for links is BLUE - hence if a text appears in blue ppl KNOW thats a link and click if the anchor text is appealing THEN when they SEE a LINK and move mouse over you still may add an effect to the link such as changing color or bg color etc
This would be considered as cheating to the visitors. Always remember that the content of the site should be written for the visitors and not for the search engines. Hence even if there are links then that should also be visible to the visitors and not just the search engines.
Are you sure? I hear different opinions on this. Thing is, when I track mouse-behaviour on my site, I see that people click on text parts even though there are no links. So I just wanted to make sure they if clicked a text part (mostly a keyword) there's a link behind it.
From a user point-of-view, it's not a good idea. While you may have some people follow the links because they found them, you have no idea how many did not because they are hidden. It is always better to have the links identifiable in some way - just underlining them is a good idea. Assuming all the links are good, logical, and not excessive, I don't think you could be accused of black-hatting; just not following good UX practices.
It doesn't matter one way or the other. It won't help you. But if your competition does see it, then they will tell Google and Google will bust you. Also, if you use javaScript and tricks, you get busted.
You kind of contradict yourself. Google tells you to design your website with real visitors in mind, not search engines. If it looks like text, what good is that to a visitor? Hiding text is clearly against google. Not even sure how this fits, as it does not fall within the category of hiding text. But it does hide a hyperlink to a visitor. http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=66353 Stephen C
The links don't have to be blue. Ours aren't blue, they're kind of lavender. But they stand out. I make sure they do because when something is a link I want people to be able to see that it is otherwise they may miss what the link is trying to point people to.