Paid Linking is the name given to the process where a webmaster or a person acting on behalf of the website pays for links to be placed on an independent website online; this link will be a link to the website who pays for that specific link. Ethical Link building is an important SEO technique, links play an important role in increasing the page rank and credibility of a website. Although search engines do not like paid linking methods, they prefer links to occur naturally - For instance an article found on the Internet is interesting and relevant therefore the reader links to the article writer on their website. This is the type of natural linking the search engines like to see and credit a site for.

Categorically speaking there are two main methods of paid linking, below I have gone into further detail about the two methods.

1. Paid Link Directories
This is where webmasters or website owners submit their website to a specific paid directory such as Best Of The Web or Yahoo Paid Directory. By submitting their website they are paying for the directory to review their site, if the directory like the site, if it meets certain directory requirements then the site will be displayed within the directory. Paid directories are not a guaranteed link, the website owner is paying for their site to be reviewed - The link may be accepted or it may not be accepted.

2. Paid Linking
Paid linking is where a website owner approaches another website asking for a link to be placed on their site for a fee. This can either be accepted or not by the potential link donor website. A price is agreed between the two sites and a fee paid for the link. This can take place where the website owner approaches another website or the website owner could go through a link broker who will agree a price on their behalf.

Search engines particularly do not like the second method of paid linking detailed above, this is because it presents an unfair advantage to those websites who have more money to spend on linking. The websites that have more money to spend may not be as relevant or content rich as the website that has less to spend on linking; although because they have more money to spend they are more likely to get the link. This distorts the search engine rankings as they may rank a site that is not as relevant or informative higher than the page that is relevant just because the non relevant site has a high Pagerank due to linking purposes. In short paid linking can weaken the search engine results, search engines do not like this. Therefore search engines such as Google are becoming wise to paid linking efforts and will penalise sites found to be taking part in paid linking.

In this part of the Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) Manual, Position Gold Ltd will be looking at the disadvantages of having hidden text on a website. This is seen as being very bad on the websites part as the search engines deem the website to be practicing black hat and unethical techniques. Below are some examples of some types of hidden text, that is commonly practicsed by unethical Search Engine Optimisation agencies and unethical websites.

Text the same colour as the background

By having background text the same colour as the background or a very similar colour as the background, many people will not see it, however the search engines will see it and will read the text and will add all of the keywords to the search engine index.

Hiding text beneath images and background layers

By having text, such as this spammy example below, on your website, you are allowing the search engine spiders to crawl your site and index your site according to your websites’ content. However, this is a black hat method of SEO and should be avoided at all costs. Those who do this to a website would not just have this on full show, they place an image over the text so that the user cannot see it, but the search engines can.

Here we see the image (below) that has been placed over the text in order to hide the spammy content.

The Z index allows you to add layers to a website and webpage, this lets you have a layer of content and then a layer or image on top of it, making the content invisible to the user, but visible to the search engines.

Hidden divisions

By having a division of content on the website, that is fixed of screen and cannot be seen is a very crafty way of hiding content from users but is also a good way of getting unethical content crawled and indexed by the search engines. The image below, shows an example of hidden divisions. The grey area shows the viewable area of a webpage (E.g. 600 pixels), however, the hidden division contains spammy content and although it cannot be seen on the webpage, it can be seen by the spiders.

Hidden Text is a bad thing for any website to have and should be avoided as much as possible, the risks are just too big, as the search engines do not take kindly to websites who are practicing unethical and black hat techniques.