Hidden Links on Financial Times website
Monday, 13 June 2005
Using 'hidden links' is one of the oldest methods of search engine spam so you wouldn't expect to see them on a respected news site like the Financial Times online, (FT.com). FT.com describes itself as "the world's leading audited business website, with more than 3.7 million unique users". Read more on Ken McGaffins Linking Matters.
http://www.linkingmatters.com/hidden-links-financial-times.html
I think they've now removed the offending links, but it would be good to hear the excuses as to why they did it (and whether moneysupermarket.com, who they were linking to, knew about it, which I presume they must have). It'd also be interesting to know how long the links had been there.
Rob.
Posted by: Rob | Monday, 13 June 2005 at 05:07 PM
Hear is a qoute from the UK Net Markekting mailing list posted by Sean Dillon of the Telegraph Group, in reponse to Ken Mcgaffins article. I kind of agree with him that it could always be put down to a coding error:
The old, or as you put it 'offending' link's style/class was called 'allWhiteNU', wheras the normal visible style/class was called 'allWide'.
Chris Osborne quote
"Early this evening, I had a phone call from Chris Osborne, head of business development at FT.com who stated very clearly that the Financial Times aren't interested in doing anything underhand with the search engines. He said that all the hidden links on the FT.com
site had now been changed to visible links pointing to Moneysupermarket.com with whom FT.com has an ongoing business relationship."
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