In the directories forum someone pointed out to me that I may be using hidden links that search engines may find spammy? This is the site http://www.realestatesoldeasy.com I am using a style="text-decoration: none tag to get rid of the automatic underlining of linked text. 1>You can see it in the left nav bar. The white text links. 2>Also, in the sponsored links at bottom of page, the blue title text and the black description text are all linked but No underlines cause it would look like crap. Would the SE's classify the black text here as a hidden link? 3>And at the very bottom of page, the fine print stuff, I have some of the text linked to internal pages. Font colors here are the same as the unlinked text an no underlines on linked text. Now this may well be hidden links. Maybe I should at least allow the underlines but can i keep the same color if its at least underlined? Does anyone know for sure what constitiutes a hidden link. And which of these 3 uses of style="text-decoration: none would pose a problem as far as the search engines are concerned.
the search engines might not think they're hidden links, but readers wont even know they're links. you can have these links underlined only when the mouse hovers over them, at least that way users will know they are definitely links. as for the fine print, they should be underlined otherwise viewers would have no idea that some parts of the text are links. i was looking at your source code and i noticed..... you're using tables, font tags, and all sorts of mess that can be minimized through the use of CSS. oh, and you dont have a doctype so the page might not look the way you want in all browsers. you may not want to redo your site but its something you should consider. SE's like clean code. i learnt almost everything i know about CSS from this site www.westciv.com/style_master/academy/css_tutorial/index.html and from forums like these. you should look into it. it'll be much easier then to change the appearance of the site without having to change EVERY SINGLE thing. ex. you want all your links to be white, one line in CSS can do that for every page in your site. then you wanna change them to green. change one word. done. instead of editing every link.
From what I've read in the Google guidelines your links might be ok. I do think you should use CSS and make the links underlined when hovered. Your site can benefit from some optimization and use of CSS. Some usefull reading http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/ http://www.w3.org/
I use FrontPage to build, and yes I know there is tonnes of un-needed code in my pages. I have not got around to learning CSS yet. I dont know why but i find it intimidating. As for SE's likeing clean code, I think it is a bit of a myth. All my sites are built this way and I have been able to get good rankings for some of them. One is #1 in yahoo (check my sig) bloated code and all. Perhaps I would not need to get as many backlinks to acheive the same results with cleaner code. I followed the v7ndotcom elursrebmem SEO contest and one of the participants that was ranking well was using a FrontPage built site and pure white hat methods. I do think those links in the fine print are hidden links. That was my intent, sort of. The links are using keywords in the text to link to internal pages about those keywords. Purely for SEO reasons, not for user navigation. They can get to those pages using the links in the nav bar. I think I'll just underline them again. Perhaps this thread would have been better placed in Search Engine Optimization catogory and not here in HTML.
SEO is not all about one factor though. if you have lots of backlinks, have been around for a long time etc, your credibility to google from that would have more weight than the code itself. so if you find that your current method of doing things is working, there's no need to switch to a different one. the reason you might want to consider CSS now though, is for the ease of use.
I also hide the underline and only show it on rollover - "hover" If the link colour is different from normal body text im sure your visitors will pick them up. Or you could have the link underlined and hide it on rollover.. just as added effect. I personally dont like the look of links with line underneath.
That's not hiding links. Hidden links are the same as hidden text - you can't see it. It's about colors, not underlining. If your backround is FFF and your links are FFF then that's hidden. Making links or text either too small or a similar color as the backround for the purpose hiding them from visitors will likely get you in trouble long term. Your not doing anything wrong.
Well, I added the underline whether or not it constitutes an actual hidden link. The issue came up because a directory owner said they may not list it because he thought they were hidden. So as to avoid this problem in the future, as i submit to more directories, the underlines are there now.
Hello, Axemedia. Search engines do not look at Web pages in the same way that humans do. They do not take care of visual aspects that are important to people, like the color or the underlining of a link. Instead, they look at the underlying HTML code, and when they saw an <A> tag they will know that it is a link. Best wishes.
In firefox your top google ads are somewhat hidden by the lower table covering the ads by gooooogle text which is against googles tos. It shows up fine though in IE. I'd suggest using a css layout or using css to style your links. White text links are never a good idea.