If you set up a site, for example, would it be a good idea to add a stealth link to the text of every page (and by stealth link I mean the colour of the link itself is the same colour as the rest of the text on the page, hence not noticeable to readers but noticeable to the SE's) so that the search engines/bots see you as a good "neighbour" as such, linking out to other sites while supposedly offering your readers a useful link. Would this be beneficial in the eyes of Google, for example? Would it help the site gain some sort of, if not authority, then credibility?
Welcome to the world of black hat SEO, this will get you caught out and hit in the SERPS if nothing else. Avoid doing this.
How can this possibly be black hat? If I have a link from my homepage to a related page on wikipedia or other authority site, how am I possibly black hatting? I am just asking if it is beneficial to have links to other authority sites from one of my webpages. What does it matter the colour of the link?
If you are hiding your links appearance because they probably shouldn't be there in the first place, and google and other search engines do have ways for detecting your camouflaged links so it does not work.
search engines want you to be transparent. you can do all you want with your site but google itself progressed a lot in detecting hidden links and will penalize a site that is in the practice of doing so. you can link to other authority sites for sure but not by hiding the links form your visitors.
It's called 'search spam', and It's one of the oldest black hat tricks in the book. People use it to hide links that might be unsightly, but would provide an SEO benifit to the page. Google specifically tells you not to do it. "Hiding text or links in your content can cause your site to be perceived as untrustworthy since it presents information to search engines differently than to visitors." http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=66353
I have taken to adding more "legitimate links" on my main blog because it seems more "natural" to include such links. And I have noticed some significant improvements in the way Google sees this site since then (but I've also done a lot of other things to help the site rank so I can't say what effect this had on it.) I did not try to hide the links (they were blue just like my affiliate links) but I do tend to bold my affiliate links while I never bolded my links to authority sites.
i had a page get deindexed by G for two months..and I was #2..one email to G, changes and 2 months later i was back in biz. Dont do it.