The grey area of Buying Links April 16
A recent post from Matt Cutts (Google Engineer) on Hidden Links caught my attention, and could have huge consequences for how you link to other sites and code links within you own site.
In the post he shows an example of a hidden link, where a link has the attributes:
onMouseOver="window.status='';return true;" style="cursor:text;color:black;text-decoration:none"
So when a visitor hovers over the link it isn’t obvious. So if this is not ok, what is? Are we ever allowed to change the window.status or cursor property? Javascript menus and javascript links use this kind of thing all the time.
The big one is buying links, apparently Google is going to be looking a lot harder at this. But how are they going to know which links are bought and which sites you just link to cause you like them? Matt talks about ways to indicate that the links are bought (nofollow, redirects etc) but what if you don’t use these methods? Will you be penalised?
Matt does a great job being the mouthpiece for Google, but some ‘official’ clarification would be good.