Stealth links and Googlebot :

Webmaster world owner and senior webmaster Brett Tabke posted an interesting thread what he calls stealth links in Google. Links that are not the same HREF links but still seem to count in Google. He calls them stealth links according to him following are some prominent stealth links:

• another site links to your graphics (img src)
• a site links to your javascript files
• a site links to your css files?
• rss feeds and other xml feeds that people can link to without notice or referrals necc being generated.
• links in email that some se’s can read (yahoo mail, hotmail, Gmail)
• links marked with noindex
• links marked with nofollow
• urls within javascript or js comments
• raw urls within css or css comments
• urls within meta data of graphics and video files
• urls within html comments
• urls within the head section or meta data of a html page
• links or pages that maybe surfed while visitor has page rank engaged on the toolbar
• the target of a constructed, obfuscated, or encrypted js url (hidden until executed)
• links behind pay walls that Google can spider via webmaster tools
• Domains that have been 301’d with links.
• Links in Flash movies (games, quizzes, etc).
• non href’ed url’s. (raw url on page http://www.webmasterworld.com)
• Links in any documents other than web pages e.g. .doc, .pdf, .txt, etc.
• blocking a page in robots.txt should make it blocked from bots, but they still spider it.

According to me most of links from the above sources are not counted by Google atleast for ranking purposes. Brett came up with the above list because of the discussion that was started in another thread about pages getting pagerank without any external links. I feel most of the people who are complaining about pages getting pagerank without external links either don’t know to check backlinks or just rely on yahoo and Google backlink data which is totally unreliable.

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