Can hidden backlinks ever be ok?

[gemcomp123]

Hi all,

I'm very new to SEO and still learning a lot.

Is it considered a black hat tactic to wrap a link in a DIV tag, with display set to none (hidden div), and what can the repercussions be?

From what I've learnt so far, is that this is a very unethical thing to be doing, and that the site hosting these links can end up being removed from Google/Bing/etc indexes completely. Is this true?

The site hosting these links is a group/parent site for a brand, and each hidden link points to one of the child sites (similar sites, but different companies in different areas).

Thanks in advance!

[gemcomp123]

Hi Ryan,

Thanks for the quick feedback. 
This clears up things for me a bit.

Thanks,
Stephen

[RyanKent]

The separation between black hat and white hat tactics is generally a clear line. The simple question is, does the code exist for the benefit of your site's visitors or solely to manipulate search engines?

DIV tags are used to apply CSS rules to specific pieces of code. If you have a link contained in a DIV and the display set to none, that link would clearly never be seen by the site's visitors. It is apparent the link exists solely to manipulate search engine results, and therefore is a black hat tactic.

When Google and other search engines discover black hat tactics being used on a site, they will take action. The action can be relatively minor such as ignoring the link. The action could be mid-range such as removing the page containing the link from the index. At the extreme end, they can remove the entire site from the index.

Each search engine has their own internal guidelines on how to handle these issues. Some issues are handled automatically via algorithms, while other issues are handled by manual review. There are no published standards on exactly which punishments will be handed out for a given violation. It is simply best to completely avoid anything black hat.