Pete Thomas <invalid@reply-via-site.com> wrote:

> Does anyone know whether a link that looks like normal text is counted
> as an invisible link. What I mean is that the CSS defines that the link
> looks just like normal text (same colour, no underline, normal weight)
> and in amongst the text it does not look like a link.
>
> It is visible, but the fact that it is a link is not visible, which
> makes me wonder how this would be viewed by Google.

Google does fetch CSS files AFAIK, but I guess they just do some analyses
on it, like they published some time ago on HTML.

Technically they can "see" that you did that, but only if they parse the
HTML and CSS and find out what visually is happening. That's quite an
expensive process, so I doubt it is currently happening.

Maybe they are able to detect simple cases, but with CSS one can make it
quite hard to detect in a simple way.

I want to do an experiment on my site, for one simple reason, I get quite
some bots that grab the first 10 links, then get those pages, and get the
first 3 or so links on those pages. I have the feeling that they are
looking for email, and want to start reporting those.

Comment spam has dried up recently, no idea if this is just a temporary
thing, or that bleep has been noticing that I bleeped away quite some
sites :-D.

--
John Experienced Perl programmer: http://castleamber.com/

Installing and configuring Apache on Windows XP (virtual hosting):
http://johnbokma.com/windows/apache-...-hosts-xp.html