Will "hidden" links from other websites help a website?

Hello there.

I manage about 10 websites for different companies in the same city.
I'm thinking of creating a page on each of them that contains links to all others.
This page will be public, crawlable by search engines but not accessible by the main page, an inner page or the menu.
This way, my customers (the owners of the websites) won't complain
that their website links to another website that is irrelevant to what they do.


Is that a good idea? Will Google count these backlinks? The companies' websites are in the same city. Will it help?

 

Hidden links are against Google's webmaster guidelines. It's not a good idea at all.

 

Sure if you want to get sued under the table. Tell me again, how you're even in business? I feel sorry for your customers, there's no telling what kind of service they're actually getting. Playing with someone's Real business and how they make a living is NOTHING to play with.

 

Thank you all for your answers!
@kjh-80. I don't understand why you are so aggressive. Nevermind, thank you for your time answering me...

 

Because you're asking an unethical question. You want to do shady practices in your own business fine, don't do it to others without them knowing.

 

I didn't say that I would not inform them. I was thinking of suggesting them (the website owners) to do this as a good practise of exchanging backlinks with websites of the same city. Also I didn't say that the links will be totally hidden, but "hidden":

For example. A last paragraph at "about us" page that will say that we suggest you "these" companies in our city.
"These" will be a link to let's say "SUGGESTED COMPANIES" page. This page will have some links of websites in the same city.
It will be crawlable, included in the sitemap but almost noone will see it or read it or click on the links.

Is this still a bad practise? Will search engines understand that I told my customers do this and they didn't want (for any reason) to link to another company's website?

 

I don't understand the point of irrelevant links that nobody is going to see or click, what's the point? Reciprocal, non-relevant links are useless in 2019 for SEO, and it's not for traffic as you stated, nobody will see or click them probably.

Not to mention when you link out to another site you "bleed" some page authority or "link juice" as it was called back in the day. Don't waste it on something that doesn't benefit from it. You're better off spreading that authority around within the same site from internal linking.

Short answer- it's a horrible idea

 

Hidden links are against Google's webmaster guidelines. It isn't just really a good idea in any respect.

 

So, you think STEALING bandwidth from your customers is a good idea? If I were one of those customers, I would FIRE your ass INSTANTLY for even THINKING of such a thing.