Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
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
-
Can some sort of wildcard redirect be used on a single folder path?
We have a directory with thousands of pages and we are migrating the entire site to another root URL. These folder paths will not change on the new site, but we don't want to use a wildcard to redirect EVERYTHING to the same folder path on the new site. Setting up manual 301 redirects on this particular directory would be crazy. Is there a way to isolate something like a wildcard redirect to apply only to a specific folder? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MJTrevens0 -
Using the same image across the site?
Hi just wondering i'm using the same image across 20 pages which are optimized for SEO purposes. I was wondering is there issues with this from SEO standpoint? Will Google devalue the page because the same image is being used? Cheers.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | seowork2140 -
Using subdomains for related landing pages?
Seeking subdomain usage and related SEO advice... I'd like to use multiple subdomains for multiple landing pages all with content related to the main root domain. Why?...Cost: so I only have to register one domain. One root domain for better 'branding'. Multiple subdomains that each focus on one specific reason & set of specific keywords people would search a solution to their reason to hire us (or our competition).
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | nodiffrei0 -
Will Google View Using Google Translate As Duplicate?
If I have a page in English, which exist on 100 other websites, we have a case where my website has duplicate content. What if I use Google Translate to translate the page from English to Japanese, as the only website doing this translation will my page get credit for producing original content? Or, will Google view my page as duplicate content, because Google can tell it is translated from an original English page, which runs on 100+ different websites, since Google Translate is Google's own software?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | khi50 -
Using href lang tag for multi-regional targeting on the same page
Hi, I have the site au.example.com and I ranked on google AustraliaI would like to be ranked also in Google New Zeland for the same page (au.example.com) Because they are geographically & culturally close Can I place href lang tag for both countries and present the same page The code should look like: OR should i have create a different page for New Zealand (for eample: http://au.example.com/EN-NZ) And the code will look like: What will work better or there is other solution? Hope I’m clear.. Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Kung_fu_Panda0 -
Is using dots in URL path really a problem?
we have a couple of pages displaying a dot in the URL path like domain.com/mr.smith/widget-mr.smith It displays fine in chrome, firefox and IE and for the user it may actually look better than replacing it by _ or -. Did this ever cause problems to anybody?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | lcourse
Any statement from google about it?
Should I change existing URLs? If so, which other characters can I use in the URL instead of underscore and dash, since in our system dash and underscore are already used for rewriting other characters. Thanks0 -
Does Google read texts when display=none?
Hi, In our e-commerce site on category pages we have pagination (i.e toshiba laptops page 1, page 2 etc.). We implement it with rel='next' and 'prev' etc. On the first page of each category we display a header with lots of text information. This header is removed on the following pages using display='none'. I wondered if since it is only a css display game google might still read it and consider duplicated content. Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BeytzNet0 -
How long is it safe to use a 302 redirect?
Hi All, Lets assume there is site A and site B, both sites are live on the internet today as standalone businesses, but they sell very similar products. Site B has built up some link equity and will eventually become the domain for site A due to an organisational re-brand. For the time being however site A will remain, but site B needs to disappear temporarily, but not lose the link equity which has been built up against it. My current thinking is to 302 redirect site B to site A such that users and search bots accessing site B will be redirected to site A whilst leaving the link equity that exists against site B fully intact and allowing us to continue to grow it should we wish to. The question is, does anybody have a view on how long it is safe to use a 302 temporary redirect for? i.e., is 8-10 months to long. Thanks, Ben
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BenRush0