Yes the major search engines will penalize you for dirty tricks like hidden text.
You can now ask for a link exchange to all those sites that you have linked on your page.
Regards,
AHT
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Browse All TopicsI have a website that I have analyzed and messaged for SEO. The latest thing I did lastnight was to add a bunch of links (maybe 75-100) at the bottom of the home page to other relevant but noncompetitive sites. Is this considered spam? The links aren't hidden or anything, I just have them at 8pt font but they are certainly readable. I am very cautious b/c I had a bad experience with Yahoo earlier this year with hidden text causing them to blacklist my site for about 2 weeks. Is it not cool to have all of these links on my page?
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The key question to ask is always: is what you are doing done only to try to "game" the search engines, or is it of benefit to the visitor to your web site?
Are the links at the bottom of your home page of benefit to your visitors? My guess is that they are not, thus even if your web site doesn't "get in trouble" now it probably will in the future--although I don't think you'll get banned, you'll just pick up some negative ranking points. If the intent was to provide benefitial links for your visitors, the font size would be larger and there would be descriptive text with each link. FYI: Google and Yahoo don't primarily look at font size to measure whether it is readable, they are looking at it to determine whether the text/links are on the page for the benefit of the visitor or to game the search engine.
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by: humeniukPosted on 2005-10-25 at 07:27:43ID: 15154460
It's not relly spam, but it's not going to help you in terms of SEO. Incoming links are relevant to your search engine rankings. Outgoing links are not.
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How have you "analyzed and messaged" your site for SEO? I would suggest you take a look at this SEO tutorial - www.seo-guy.com/tutorial.h