How to Hide Links for SEO
Webmasters and developers hide links for many reasons, but the most common one is to try and increase search rankings by hiding outgoing links from search engine robots. Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of improving a website's visibility so that it ranks higher in natural search results. Many developers deliberately hide links on some pages to increase the rank of others. This is called "link sculpting."
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Instructions
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Open your website's HTML editor and select the page with links you want to hide. All of the most popular search engines (Google, Yahoo! and MSN) use robots, which scan for robot meta tags in order to rank your page and place it in search results.
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Amend the robot tag in your page's HTML code so that only robots you want to find your links will. The robot meta tag looks like this:
<meta name="robots" content="noindex, nofollow" />
Replace the word "robots" with the name of a particular search engine's robots so that the link is only found by them:
<meta name="googlebot" content="noindex, nofollow" />
<meta name="slurp" content="noindex, nofollow" />
Include the "no follow" tag to prevent robots from following the link, making it hidden in SEO terms.
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Use basic CSS language to hide links for SEO purposes. CSS is a simple style sheet language that is often used to describe the look and formatting of a Web page. In your HTML editor, add the tag "#element_id { visibility: hidden; }" to a link to hide it. You can also make it almost invisible by reducing the pixel size down to "1" by using the tag "#element_id { font-size: 1px; }."
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Tips & Warnings
Search engines do not always like Web pages that hide links and may even impose a penalty in many cases, so always research the best way to achieve the SEO benefits you want before hiding links.
References
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