Hidden links can cause YOUR web site to be banned, even if you do not have them.

One of the techniques that many unscrupulous web site designers use is 'hidden links'. Yup. The hide the links from your view, but not the search engines.

They are hoping that the search engines will follow them, which they will, but so do we....

Google provides a very nice set of guidelines that says do not use hidden links nor link to those who are using them.

I will quote some information from the above page, which is there, about halfway down:

"Don't participate in link schemes designed to increase your site's ranking or PageRank. In particular, avoid links to web spammers or "bad neighborhoods" on the web as your own ranking may be affected adversely by those links. "

Hmmmm...so who is a "web spammer"? Well...read on to the SPECIFIC recommendations of who is a web spammer:

"Avoid hidden text or hidden links."

WOW!

Let's review this carefully:

Google has expressly said do NOT link to web sites that use hidden links as it may hurt YOUR website ranking.

Are you ready to play around with your ranking?

Then the simple answer is to stop linking to websites that use hidden links.

This begs the question:

How can I tell who has hidden links?

Our answer? That's what we are here for...