SEO Web Design Patterns

When I refer to a term "SEO web design patterns" I mean reoccurring site design or coding solutions that are most common in many web site optimization processes. It doesn't mean there are no other solutions, but the tricks described below are the most common on the internet.

Hiding links/content

SEO developers hide links in two ways: they hide links from search engine robots, or they hide them from users.

Hiding links from robots may be practiced by some folks who do not want to pass page rank to referred sites. There may be many reasons for doing that. Some shady link sellers can use this in order to keep as much page rank in place as possible1. Some directories2 do that, and besides, I've seen blogs hiding links from robots in some fancy ways to prevent comment spammers from getting link juice (but there is a more common and more popular way to tell SEs that outgoing link can't be trusted - "nofollow").

Moreover, some banner advertising companies may redirect links through their special pages in order to count clicks (well, they are not intended to hide something, but having a page like "count-clicks.php"3 linked from zillion sites in SEs results makes no sense).

Further more, hidden links may be used in page rank sculpting. The term "page rank sculpting" is used when web developers hide some parts of their sites to keep more weight on important pages. For example, you have contact page that contains no keywords you want to be ranked for - so you'd like links to this page to be hidden from search engine robots but still visible to your site's users.

Hiding links from users may be favored by some accessibility/usability activists who still remember generation 4 browsers and care about their site's accessibility to impaired users. Such links are not hidden from every user. Links like "skip navigation", "jump to content" are very useful for users with screen readers. In this case users do not have to listen when a screen reader software reads your navigation again and again or goes through your shiny widgets or ads on the top of the page.

Also hiding links from users is sometimes practiced to spam search engines. In that case a page may look pretty decent for an ordinary user, but for search engines it may appear stuffed with links.

In general Search Engines advice against link hiding (more about links hidden from users from Google perspective). However, I wouldn't call it wrong when it comes to the usability/accessibility thing. I see many sites doing these tricks to make life easier for their disabled users. And these pages perform well in search results, as well. In this case my advice would be: do not hide anything if there is no serious reason for that, but if you have to - do it only for a good deed.

This article is divided into four parts:

Footnotes

  1. I use the term "passing the page rank" even though it's not completely correct. Links pointing to another site are used to determine site's relevancy, visibility, trust factor (for example, if whitehouse.gov linked to some porn site, search engines would value that porn site more even though there is only one link pointing to that site and there is not much page rank value flowing).
  2. For example: Bussines.com is hiding links at the time when I'm writing this article.
  3. Such pages have tons of links and zero content.