Google looks at the source code of our website. If it finds a link in the source code, it processes it (given that it’s not a no-follow link). Therefore, it seems possible that we can hide a link so it does not display on the visible part of our website and Google will process it the same way. On this test, we see if Hidden Outbound links via css can affect rank.
Test Downloads
Transcription Below
What we are trying to do here is checking if hidden outbound links are a ranking factor. The idea is that the links are hidden via CSS and quite cleverly, what David did in this test is put them into a button. You can see that there is a no display class and what that does is that it effectively doesn’t display what is being shown. So this link is completely hidden to the visitors but obviously, it is in the source code so Google can crawl it.
What ended up happening is the page moved up to the number two spot. It jumped two spots to number two from five. Pretty sweet that the hidden link passes juice. This is very applicable for those of you who are doing PBNs. When you go to a standard PBN, you can look at the site and see that it is a PBN from miles away.
This data points out, if you were to put links hidden in this manner, when somebody looks at the site initially, they are not going to see that the site is a pbn. It would look like a regular looking site. And by using css, you can do any number of things to them. But the long and short points to it is that the link hidden with css will pass juice.
Obviously though, that is very black hat and cloaking and Google doesn’t like that at all so, you should obviously think about your risk tolerance level prior to doing anything with this.