[thelist] Link Text and SEO

[Sarah Adams]

>> I'm going to guess that you are joking, but just in case you're not, and
>> for the benefit of others... This is a risky way of trying to trick the
>> search engines. While you may not see any negative result right away, it
>> could get the site banned form search engines.
>> http://www.seologic.com/faq/hidden-text.php
>> http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=66353
> 
> And if SEs are blocked from css via robots.txt, how are they going to know?
> And how would they differentiate from 'legitimate' uses of such CSS 
> properties?

Good points. Although I would think that just because (reputable) search 
engines won't index your CSS if blocked by robots.txt, that doesn't mean 
they won't look at it. I could be totally wrong about that, of course.

But the tip about hidden text being frowned upon came straight from the 
horse's mouth (i.e. Google), so why take your chances?

-- 
sarah adams
web developer & programmer
http://sarah.designshift.com