Using ‘hidden links’ is one of the oldest methods of search engine spam so you wouldn’t expect to see them on a respected news site like the Financial times online, (FT.com). FT.com describes itself as “the world’s leading audited business website, with more than 3.7 million unique users”. But I’ve found hidden links on the site.
The offending links were found while doing competitive link analysis for a client, http://www.debtcounsellors.co.uk/ and within an hour we found 138 of them - all pointing to the site of Moneysupermarket.com.
The hidden links can be found on pages such as ‘FT.com / Your money / Money guides’ . The hidden link is under the list of six partner sites that include The New York Times and Investors Chronicle in the bottom right hand side of the screen.
Here’s an image of how the FT.com page appears to any reader - the link is invisible because the text has been defined as white, the same colour as the background.
Here, if I choose ’select all’ from the View menu on my browser, the link is revealed.
These links are extremely valuable.
Google will regard a site such as FT.com as a trusted authority and any site that FT.com links to will get a significant boost to its ranking. The site will move towards the top of search engine results, bringing more visitors and more lucrative business as a result.
Moneysupermarket.com says that its partners include the Financial Times, Yahoo!, BTopenworld and that over a hundred UK banks, building societies and insurance companies have a trading relationship with moneysupermarket.com. They are big players and in 2002, “sourced over £2 billion in personal loan lending alone” ($3.6 billion).
Such search engine spam on the world’s leading audited business website raises some important questions:
Debtcouns ellors.co.uk’s director John Porter was understandably upset, “Personal credit is a very crowded market and we have to face fierce competition all the time. That’s a fact of business life but this is hugely unfair competition.”
This example shows that dodgy tactics can be found even on respected websites. If this is evidence of a deliberate strategy on the part of both or either of these websites, then they need to re-think their strategy.
If on the other hand, it is a one-off rogue element that is responsible, they need to remove the links and tighten their procedures so that it doesn’t happen again.
Amazing! Now did Google
Amazing! Now did Google smack ‘em down the same way they would do us little guys? Or is this www.BMW.de all over again?
Financial Times is an
Financial Times is an interesting site with over 22K back links and is very content rich with information from mortgage loans to virtually anything having to do with money, finances or the like. I recently visited a conference where Matt Cutts from Google spoke and affirmed that Google will and does spider CSS files particularly for same-color/same-link background and will penalize as such. The question is how much penalization is given and for a site such as FT, are they so big that the penalization is insignificant compared to its overall rank?
The white text is gone now
The white text is gone now but look at Google’s cache and you can see evidence of this. The cached page dated 2 Jun 2005 08:47:51 GMT has the moneysupermarket link coded up as ‘a class=”allWhiteNU” href=”http://www.moneysupermarket.com/” target=”_blank”‘ using a text class of allWhiteNU. The live page now uses the same class as the other linked sites ‘allWide’. Coder mistake?
Have a look at a links
Have a look at a links search for moneysupermarket, its not just the FT!
excellent research Ya think
excellent research Ya think Google will ban FT.com like they did Wordpress? No chance!
My bet? This was a single
My bet? This was a single rogue web-developer trying to raise the profile of one of his other sites/clients, and was never even mentioned to anyone in management, let alone approved by them.
I don’t think it’s so
I don’t think it’s so bad.. people try all kinds of crazy stuff. So they get penalized or not, that’s between them and google or other search engines. Personally, I think Google’s crawlers or algorithms recognize white text on a white background and discount it anyway.. whoever is paying for trying to use the white text link I think is more stupid or trying their luck than evil.
I,ve been trying to do all
I,ve been trying to do all the things to get top listing and a big outfit like this is pulling these underhanded tricks. WOW! I hope the search engines penalize them for these tactics.
This does not surprise
This does not surprise me.Thank you for discovering and exposing this deception.