Using CSS to hide anchor text
-
Hi all,
In my website, I would like to use CSS to set the anchor text to "website design service"(my company provides web design service) but show the button text as "website", due to some artistic reasons. Therefore, the anchor text for the link is "website design service" but what users see is "websites". Does this sound spammy to Google? Is it a risky move that might hurt my SEO?
Looking for some advises here. Thank you very much.
Best,
-
It helps! Thank you!
-
It's something you shouldn't _really _doing so it comes with the usual warning of "use with caution"...
That said, the chances of anything negative happening here are so slim it's probably not worth worrying about. If you were cloaking shady anchor text relating to gambling or viagra it would be a different story.
There are two other points to be aware of here though. Firstly, it's very unlikely you'll see any ranking difference between those two link anchors in your link profile. The other is that it sounds like you're dropping footer links on your clients' sites to build your link profile. That one is cause for genuine concern if it's on a large volume. If it's only a couple of sites, disregard everything below!
How these are treated post Penguin 4.0 I don't know just yet but at best, they're given very little weight. We've just finished pulling one of our web design clients back up from ~ page 8 after he built a large volume of those same footer links over about 6 months. It may be because they were all irrelevant links (his clients have nothing to do with web design, obviously) or perhaps because his anchor profile was 98% "Web Design". Which of these caused the problem is quite irrelevant.
We removed those links from all but a handful of sites and he's back to the middle of page 1 so the real work just started. This was earlier in the year so again, I have no clue how that same thing would play you now after the latest update.
Hope that helps!
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Author Credit when Using Existing Article
Hello, We have received permission from a consultant we partner with to publish one of his articles on our site (listing him as the author, of course). However, he currently has the article published on his site, so if I put it on my site will I get penalized for stealing content? Is there some sort of tagging that will provide him/his site credit? Maybe a canonical tag?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AliMac260 -
One Article, Multiple(Same Keyword) Anchors, Same Urls
Hey Folks, So I have a 1000 word articles talking about say Dubai Holiday. Is it okay to have 4-5 Dubai Holiday as anchor linked to the same page. Or it should be only be used once.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SAISEO0 -
Adding some unique text to search
I do not know how to easily explain that but I will try 🙂 We are running the yellow pages in our country, where most (all) of the companies are listed. Each company has their keywords that are used in our search. All of those search keywords are indexed by Google and it goes something like that domain.com/search/keyword So far this page only lists the companies that match the search query. So that's not much content. I'm thinking about adding a sentence that would go something like this:
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | FCRMediaLietuva
The search query lists the companies of our country that do KEYWORD. So far COUNT was found. That seems pretty short and I am not sure if that does a lot of help for Google. But I cannot think of more text. Any ideas? Or should I give up on the idea of adding anything at all?0 -
Duplicating a site on 2 different ccTLDs and using cannonical
Hello, We have a site that sells a certain product on www.example.com. This site contains thousands of pages including a whole section of well written content that we invested a lot of money in making. The site ranks on many KWs both brand and non-brand related. SERPs include the Homepage and many of the articles mentioned. We receive traffic and clients to this site from around the world, BUT our main geo-targeting is UK. Due to lack of resources and some legal needs we now have to create a new site - www.example.co.uk that all UK traffic will be able to purchase the product only from this site and not from the .com site anymore. We have no resources to create new content for the new .co.uk site and that is the reason we want to duplicate the site on both domains and use a canonical tag to point the .co.uk site as the primary site. Does anyone have experience with such activity? will this work across the whole site? We need to have a fast solution here, as we do not have too much time to wait because of the legal issue I mentioned. What is the best solutions you can offer to do this so we do not lose important SERPs. On the one hand since our main market is the UK, we assume the main site to promote will be www.example.co.uk but as said earlier, we still have users from other parts of the world as well. Is there any risk that we are missing here? Thanks James
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Tit0 -
Using pictures from another domain
We are building several sites for several clients which will be using images from the manufacturer. Our dev team wants to insert the manufacturer's url for the images, instead of actually downloading the image and hosting on our server. There are thousands of images, so downloading images to our server will be time consuming, so we are looking for a shortcut.... however I'm concerned this will cause other issues. Is using manufactueresdomain.com/12345.jpg going to cause SEO issues? will this generate Google penalties? Since we are not able to control the image file name, we cannot optimize it. We will add Alt text and Title tag for each image, but the file name is random characters. How important is the file name for SEO?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Branden_S0 -
How to know when do use singular vs plural in anchor text and on-page copy?
I'm building out a specific section of our site and I want to make sure I target it correctly. Is there a rule of thumb when to know how to use "car" vs "cars"? (as an example) Is there a specific way to research the right approach? thank you!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JDatSB0 -
On site links triggering anchor text algorithmic penatly?
I'm trying to figure out why a drop in ranking occurred and think it may be related to an increase in on site links. I've attached images of the SEO moz report showing a jump in links from a few hundred to around 15,000 within the space of a week. I think this may be due to some on site work I did when I created categories (I use wordpress) for a large number of cities and towns in the UK. I soon realised I'd run into duplicate content issues and removed all these categories within a few days. As I added categories I also ran into 'too many on page links' warnings as each category I added created a new link and I ended up with hundreds on each page. If you look at the analytics reports I suffered a huge drop in rankings on the 10th March and think this could be due to an on site anchor text problem that was caused by adding the categories and in turn creating many on site links. SEO moz found these links on the 11th and 25th Feb but my guess is that Google found them around at the same time but if these links are the problem then why didn't my rankings drop until the 10th March? Surely they would have dropped sooner? Would this cause a drop in rankings? I've recieved an email from google saying that no manual penalty was applied to the site after I submitted a reconsideration request. Therefore it must be some kind of algorithmic penalty. Could this be the problem and if not what else should I look at. My baclink profile appears to be okay and I've been careful to vary my anchor text with inbound link building. I'm at a loss as to what to do next. Any help will be much appreciated! UXsMLYS.png Ov9AOs8.png
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SamCUK0 -
Ok to use rich snippets for same product on multiple pages?
I am developing a new set of pages for a series of products which exist on separate sub domains linked to the root domain. The product pages on the sub domains have rich snippets; review count, review score etc. The new pages im building out are for the same products though on the root domain and with different content. Im not comfortable marking those pages up with rich snippets too given they will have the same review counts, scores etc though would like to if its viable? Any thoughts/opinions? Thanks, Andy
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AndyMacLean0