Hiding links from Guests - Bad for SEO?

Hi,

I used to use the Hide links from Guests hack from vB.org. It was helpful to improve user registrations.

But a few months back I was hit by a -950 Google penalty. As a part of the recovery i've disabled this hack, along with many other onsite and offsite solutions. I read somewhere that too small number of outbound links can hurt your SEO. Anyway my penalty is revoked after a few months. I have no idea if disabling the above hack has anything to do with it but I am in doubt if I could enable it again.

Looking forward for your suggestions & ideas.

cheers,
Hemanth

what is a -950 Google penalty?

Some people say hiding links such as making it the same color as the background or however else you hide them, hurts your PR...

what is a -950 Google penalty?

If you are hit with this your search positions will be moved to the last page of search results. It may not be exactly a 950 position drop for all keywords but in effect you get ZERO SERPs from Google.

Some people say hiding links such as making it the same color as the background or however else you hide them, hurts your PR...

Yes, it's true and it means hiding links to the human visitors using CSS or javascript or small fonts or using same font color as background. e.g. the css trick suggested here in vbseo forums to put a h1 title instead of image logo.

I'm talking about removing links altogether for guests, i.e. humans & search bots alike.

cloaking is a whole different ball game from removing links. As long as human guests see the same thing as bot guests, there's no cloaking effect.

However, if there's no links to follow in the first place, google won't be able to crawl your site.

However, if there's no links to follow in the first place, google won't be able to crawl your site.

What do yo mean by that. This hack will just remove the external urls, not any internal ones. So it won't affect the internal PR sculpturing offered by vBSEO.

Any ideas from vBSEO team? I guess it's better to ask in Webmasterworld forums.

if its just externals, thats fine. google will still be able to crawl your site. But note that external links are not necessarily a bad thing to have either.

Originally Posted by Hemanth

Hi,

I used to use the Hide links from Guests hack from vB.org. It was helpful to improve user registrations.

But a few months back I was hit by a -950 Google penalty. As a part of the recovery i've disabled this hack, along with many other onsite and offsite solutions. I read somewhere that too small number of outbound links can hurt your SEO. Anyway my penalty is revoked after a few months. I have no idea if disabling the above hack has anything to do with it but I am in doubt if I could enable it again.

Looking forward for your suggestions & ideas.

cheers,
Hemanth

Unless you can identify some other cause of the penalty, you should be careful about re-enabling such a hack.

IMO, it's vital to have some external links on your site, particularly to relevant, high value/interest sites related to your own.

You might consider the vBSEO Conditional Signature plugin. However, if you were flagged for some kind of external linking manipulate you might want to be careful. Suddenly disabling a bunch of external URLs Google already knows about might get you re-flagged.