I have this code in my css file



Than I used that class to hide some links on my frontpage. There are about 8 of them, all porn links.
My question is: will Search engines recognize this and penalize my site for it? Like they would with red links on red bg and stuff?

Edit: I know most of you here will think of hiding links as spam, but some guy pays me good money for it which I can really use.

Let's face it - it is spam.

I don't believe that googlebot will pick that sort of stuff up at the moment. I hope they will add that cabability soon. A human would easily understand that as spam and may report you. Another human could then penalise your site.

Any spam is a risk. It's up to you whether you want to take the risk for the money. I suppose it depends a lot on whether you could cope with loosing the site if the worst came to the worst.

Yes it is spam. But humans too can't find it easily untill they read their HTML code or CSS. I mean it's OFF the page (not visible to anyone, except the VIEW SOURCE)

i think it's a bad idea to have hidden links. sooner or later, they'll do something about it. So many ways to trick SEs, but in the end probably not worth having to worry all the time. Better to be safe.

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Well it wasn't my intention to trick the SE's, just to keep my page clean and still get money. But as I started reading up on SEO I started wondering if it might be spam so I asked.

My site as a whole does get a few k of SE traffic per day so I wouldn't wanna have it blacklisted. Question is will it really get banned? I don't mind a few less pr points for that kind of money, but no ban.

Ernie

It'd be an all or nothing thing unfortunately.

hmmm tough call Ernie, the other thing you need to consider is the fact that your outbound linking to irrelevant content which can hurt you in the serps, even if the links arent visible the SE spiders are following them.

BTW what do you consider good money? I would wager that I could find you some topic specific sponsors that you would not have to hide for likely the same $ as a porn guy is paying you and then you could actually legitimately display the links with perhaps even a ranking benefit for being an authority

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Good question , would they pick the link up as spam if it was css styled the same color as the background?

Well, there are better ways to hide links if you really want to but IMO SEO guy gave the best answer.

Link to quality, related sites instead. You will be doing a service for your visitors and the recieving site and...no spam

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