FT.com Busted for Having Hidden links

Posted on June 12th, 2005
by Michael Gray in Grayhat SEO, SEO

There’s a lot of talk about the hidden links that were spotted over at FT.com recently. It seems Ken McGaffin was doing a some link analysis and noticed something a little fishy. Upon further inspection he found some text links that were hidden on some financial pages (ie white text on a white background). The only way to spot these links was to hit CTRL-A and the links are visible (screen shots below) notice the text “moneysupermarket.com“

Normal view	Hidden Links Shown

Now while this kind of thing happens all of the time, and it’s clearly a big no-no as far as the search engines are concerned. Outing someone else’s website is definitely a slippery slope. I don’t take a black and white view of things, and say “no website should ever be outted”, but I don’t think regularly dragging people’s websites through the mud is a good idea either (bad karma ya’ know). There’s an excellent debate about the ethics of the outing of FT.com over at Threadwatch.

I think the real question here is this big enough to be considered newsworthy, and worth bypassing normal channels of politely letting the other webmaster know? Many disagree, but I feel it is. The example I use is what happens if you are walking down the street and pass a man selling fake rolex watches, is that news worthy? I’d have to say no. However what if the person selling fake Rolex watches was Arnold Schwarzenegger, does that make it newsworthy. I leave it up to you to reach your own conclusion but I think most people would agree that it is news.

Martinibuster brings up some excellent points as well, concerning the motivation for this act. While the possibility does exist that this is an action approved by FT.com, clearly that is the most unlikely of possibilities. Much more probable is that some junior level web programmer put these links in there, and was compensated for it. The $64 question is was it done to benefit or harm the website in question? While it would be nice to hear from FT.com about this, I think the fact that they haven’t responded after three days, and the links are still up, indicates they aren’t monitoring the blogosphere. So I think links will probably just quietly disappear and the guilty party will most likely be sacked.

However the more vexing question is how will search engines treat this behavior. It’s clearly against the webmaster guidelines of Google and other search engines. In the past the punishment was a complete ban of the website in question, a harsh a draconian punishment to be sure. This reasoning behind this is two-fold it “taught” the offending party a lesson and served as warning to other webmasters not to follow suit. However what are the implications of fully banning FT.com? On Aaron Wall’s SEO blog, one of the first places this was discussed, several possibilities are brought up. If FT.com is delisted in Google, they could quite easily write an article about how “Google is broken”. Imagine a chain reaction of events, culminating in a downward stock spiral of Google’s stock price, that could occur as result. Millions of post IPO Google millionaires could see their net worth vanish in a poof of smoke overnight. So should Google take a chance and roll the dice and ban FT.com, or should will they let FT.com survive and and set a precedent of unequal punishment for equal offences? Interesting questions with no clear cut and easy answers to be sure.

DISCLAIMER: I am an SEO, but am not affiliated with FT.com, moneysupermarket.com, it’s competitors or any other finance or finance related websites. Additionally I have not received and compensation monetary or otherwise to write this post.