Hidden Links - Peek-a-boo, I can see you.....

[Easy Cash]

Anyone know how to create links - outbound internal links from your homepage yet not have them visible on your homepage?

Obviously you can make them the same color as the background color and hide them - but I believe this is against Googles TOS.

The issue is - if you have a sales page - you don't want any distractions whatsoever but you need outbound internal links to help with SEO.

Any ideas to get around this?

[Ben Roy]

Instead of trying to game the system, why not have some external links on some internal pages? In other words, do you have a Privacy Policy, FAQ, About Us, Contact Us, etc? If you do, you could bury a couple external links there, or you could link from those pages to some other page from which you could link out.

[getsmartt]

There are several ways of doing this, all of them unethical, but...
Use your css file to shrink them, color them, hide them under another layer.

or just stick them down in the footer, footers dont draw too much attention

[Michael Taylor]

Just make them ordinary links. Why try to hide what you're doing from your reader?

If you're posting a link, you should do it because it gives value to your audience. Not just so you can win points with a machine.

If you don't want your customer to leave through an outgoing link, then don't post any outgoing links on a sales page. Simple as that.

Also, Google is clever enough to detect link color and whether it has an underline or not. You won't fool Google, so don't even try.

[Easy Cash]

I am not trying to hide them from the reader.

I don't want the links on my page because as a landing page - it is better with absolutely zero options for the visitor apart from 'buy' or 'sign up' or whatever the call to action is.

The problem is when I try to use a sitemap to index the site - the Google bot only recognises 1 page.

All the other pages are pointing one way to the sales page.

[getsmartt]

Originally Posted by Easy Cash

I am not trying to hide them from the reader.

I don't want the links on my page because as a landing page - it is better with absolutely zero options for the visitor apart from 'buy' or 'sign up' or whatever the call to action is.

Then you are trying to hide them from your reader

The problem is when I try to use a sitemap to index the site - the Google bot only recognises 1 page.

All the other pages are pointing one way to the sales page.

Like I said above there are myriad of ways to hide links, but if you are a part of a link exchange you are cheating the exchange, if you are looking for Google rankings then you are violationg their TOS, because you are targeting pages to their spider, rather than your visitor.

[indexphp]

Sitemap - Privacy Policy - Contact Us

Links like that will only increase conversion

[bgmacaw]

Just bury them in the footer using a small, but not so small as to be unreadable, font. People who dig that far probably will be difficult to convert to sales anyway.

You can also use CSS techniques to hide links in plain sight without violating any Google guidelines. Primarily you do this by making the links technically visible but very nondescript and different from the links you want obvious on the page.

[GarrieWilson]

As stated, use CSS or you could link small images in the footer