: What is the purpose of a hidden rel=dofollow link? I recently took over webmaster duties for a website and found the following item repeated on every page of the site. <div style="position:

@Heady270

It is an attempt to use trickery to influence search engine rankings. Search engines count links on pages as "recommendations." More inbound links generally mean higher rankings. Using anchor text in those links with relevant keywords can directly contribute to good rankings for those keywords.

Search engines view this as a black hat technique. Google says:


Hiding text or links in your content to manipulate Google’s search rankings can be seen as deceptive and is a violation of Google’s Webmaster Guidelines. Text (such as excessive keywords) can be hidden in several ways, including:


Using white text on a white background
Locating text behind an image
Using CSS to position text off-screen
Setting the font size to 0
Hiding a link by only linking one small character—for example, a hyphen in the middle of a paragraph



Using hidden links can get both the site with the link and the site receiving the link penalized. It was either added by a very naive webmaster that doesn't realize this is one of the worst SEO things they can do; or by malware.

Vote Up Vote Down