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I’m A Bad Boy – Hidden Links

June 13, 2007 - Filed under: web design — Tags: ,

My Google page rank recently which was OK for a year old site “4” recently dropped to a big fat “0”.

I couldn’t think of what I did to incur their wrath and then it hit me like a ton of bricks. I recently added a spam trap from the Project Honey Pot site. I followed their instructions to add links to the special page they give you to attract, log and out spammers. They give you links that won’t show up on your page for your human visitors, but will be able to be read and followed by the programs that spammers send out to collect email addresses from your website. They then give them fake email addresses and track their spam.

What didn’t occur to me until now (but should have) is that these kind of hidden links are looked upon by Google as some kind of a trick to improve your page rank and so your search engine position. I know this, but I was blinded by my do a good deed for the world ego trip.

I posted a question on their webmasters blog and even before they answer it I’m going to remove these links. I have also decided not to abandon Project Honey Pot and will simply add a small out of the way link to their page on my site and will continue to try to help them out.

1 Comment »

  1. […] There are plain text links in the code which are hidden from view. They don’t show even if you turn the images off so they may be just for the search engines. That may be a bad thing. I got into trouble once with Google for hiding a link. […]

    Pingback by A Favorite New Site - One-Button Mouse — November 4, 2007 @ 9:54 am

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