My competitor's sneaky link building technique

[SleekCopy]

Hi,

I can't figure out how my competitor seems to fit four invisible nav menus into her home page. If you view her page source and type "/about" for example, it shows five examples of the text linking to her "about" page. But four of them can't be located on the web page (they are hidden). How does she do this? She basically has four duplicate links that are counted for SEO but can't be seen on the webpage.

address: http:// camilla peffer.com. au/

Any ideas?

[BradsDeals]

As I understand it, Google only counts a link the first time it encounters it on a page, so if she's linking to the About page 5x from the same page, then only the first one counts and the other four are ignored. So I'm not sure I see the point in hiding those four other links unless it was somehow accidental or she's getting some really bad advice somewhere.

[SleekCopy]

Yeah, I just figured it out as you replied. Thanks for the follow up.

[MoosaHemani]

adding the nav in to separate div and hid it accordingly... this is simple any developer will be able to do that!

But again, my recommendation is not to try this at all!!

[SleekCopy]

Thanks for the answers EGOL and Moosa.

Moosa, out of interest, how is she doing it? I will take your advice and not worry about it. But how can she have four nav menus that aren't displayed on the website?

[MoosaHemani]

How is she hiding this is an easy part but if I would be at her place I won’t do that and this is because Google don’t like displaying different page to user and a different version to search engine bot. To me this is kind of gray hat.

If she is ranking at the moment she might not rank for a longer period of time and you will see a drop soon (may be in the next update).

I will highly recommend displaying the same version of the page to users as well as to search engine bots this way you become more transparent and you will see Google will lift up your rankings…soon!

Let’s wait and hope the Google to do justice a little sooner J.

Hope this helps!

[EGOL]

Nah... I bet a month's pay that isn't  it.

[SleekCopy]

Argh.. I know, but that it is the reason she is no.1 in Google... double my links with half the page size. It's such an unfair advantage..

[EGOL]

I can't figure out how my competitor seems to fit four invisible nav menus into her home page.

Putting invisible stuff into your pages is not a good idea.  Google is well known for slappin' people down if they have stuff in their code that is not shown to visitors.

So, time spent trying to figure out "how your competitor is doing this" is better spent just chucklin' about it and getting straight back to the work of making a good website.

I rarely look at my competitors' code.  I might do that for about ten seconds per year.  I don't have enough time to make all of the content that I need.  Its best to spend time on that.