The personal website of Michael Briggs : Professional SEO and Internet Geek

Banner ad style links are all the rage – and enraging

Link building makes me smile. It’s an art as well as a science and I’m always being nosey about what people are doing where and the ways in which so many people obfuscate links to users show them to search engines. Increasingly what I;ve been seeing that a banner style ad is becoming the rage.

One of those I’ve seen getting used more and more is to put a set of links in a div attach a JavaScript link onto the whole div so that if the user clicks you get taken to page a. Under this you place a set of links – all to the same domain with some nice anchor texts and link these back to the specific pages – so that the search engine can read and index all of the links.

UX is completely different from what SX (I just made that up but by SX I mean Search eXperience I was going to use the acronym for Search Engine eXperience but I didn’t fancy getting adult filtered). there is no way that a user can click the link – unless they have JavaScript turned off of course.

What was more kinda surprising that I’ve came across a big brand doing this – not a small company. I guess they know if Google catch ‘em nothing will happen. Too big to be banned I guess.

<div>
<ul>
<li><a href=”http://www.domain.com/keyword-rich-url-1.html”>Keyword Set 1</a></li>
<li><a href=”http://www.domain.com/keyword-rich-url-2.html”>Keyword Set 2</a></li>
<li><a href=”http://www.domain.com/keyword-rich-url-3.html”>Keyword Set 3</a></li>
<li><a href=”http://www.domain.com/keyword-rich-url-4.html”>Keyword Set 4</a></li>
<li><a href=”http://www.domain.com/keyword-rich-url-5.html”>Keyword Set5</a></li>
</ul>
</div>

TBH I’m kinda impressed at this but also dissapointed if the search engines can’t algorithmically see it. Oh well. Let me know if you find any pages hosting this kinda stuff. Interested to see how widespread it is.

This entry was written by Michael, posted on July 19, 2010 at 2:45 pm.

Categories : Link Building, Search Engine Optimisation and tagged , , .

I'd be delighted to hear your thoughts on this post and if you could leave a comment it would be cool or use the trackback function if you cite this post on your blog and I'll come and say hello.

This post was written by Michael Briggs

2 Comments

  1. Michael Fox
    Posted July 23, 2010 at 9:18 pm | Permalink

    I love link building and I know that you website in noFollow website. I am posting comments because I found this article great. It is the first time that I see one strategy like that being revelead. I agree with you, Google will not ban big companies.

    Great Post

    Thanks

  2. Melanie Nathan
    Posted October 20, 2010 at 8:12 pm | Permalink

    I have a client with a competitor in the hypnosis niche who does this same thing. He basically hides links and keywords behind his header image. It works too because in some cases he actually ranks along side my client, which is pretty annoying :/

    On the flip side, I also know of a site, with extremely high PR, that SELLS links in this fashion (where SEs can see them, but users cannot)!

    The average site owner is up against a lot in terms of blackhat savvy competitors.. which is why it’s best to just hire a link builder such as me lol ;)

    P.S. Great blog Michael! Really glad I stopped in :)
    .-= Melanie Nathan´s last blog ..Data Girl! An Experiment in Paid Link Building Tools =-.

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