As someone who writes about financial topics on a part-time basis and has a day job that promotes ethical search engine optimization, I was shocked to discover that the Financial Times was selling hidden links on their site, violating most search engines' ethical coding policies.
Background on Hidden Links
If the terms “search engine optimization” and “hidden links” are new to you, let me quickly explain. One major factor that search engines take into account when determining how important your site is when deciding how to rank it against all the others, is link popularity. If your site is considered popular, meaning lots of other sites link to it – especially sites that are considered popular themselves, then your site should rank high. For example, the Financial Times is going to show up higher in a search for “Financial News” then Billy Bob’s Financial News Roundup. As for hidden links, there is a way to program a page so that a user won’t see a link, but the search engine will. Search engines don’t like this because it is deceptive – they want to see the page exactly as a person would. A hidden link is one that the user would never see or click on, but the search engine would because it doesn’t know it is hidden. Hidden links are one of the oldest methods of spamming the search engines.
The Discovery
As Ted McGaffin was doing a competitive analysis for a site that competes with moneysupermarket.com, he took a look at who was linking to them. He was probably surprised to find the Financial Times linking to moneysupermarket.com. In fact, if he looked closely, he would have found over 220 links to moneysupermarket.com from the Financial Times. Also to his surprise, he probably had trouble finding the actual link when he went to the Financial Times website because it was hidden. He said he discovered the link by using the edit – select all command in his browser (alternatively he could have clicked his mouse on the upper part of the page and dragged it down to a lower part of the page, or he could have viewed the source code).
So what did Ted do? He made a post on his Web site, showing what the Financial Times was doing. Others in the search engine optimization community took notice and eventually the Financial Times must have caught on because a couple days later the link was made visible. Then Ted received a phone call from the Financial Times claiming they “aren’t interested in doing anything underhand with the search engines”. Ted asked why it happened but never received a direct response other than it shouldn’t have.
As I was wrapping up this article, the New York Times posted a similar article which included a statement from the Financial Times:
"They just didn't want to clog up the real estate with an overt link," she said. "As soon as we figured out it was something we weren't supposed to do, we took it right down immediately."
Why Does This Matter?
So you might be thinking to yourself, "big deal - it’s a paid ad and nobody could see it, why all the fuss?" Well, the Financial Times website (FT.com) is considered one of the most trustworthy sites – they even brag about being "the world's leading audited business website, with more than 3.7 million unique users." They violated both our trust and the very clear rules set forth by the search engines regarding ethical coding: no hidden links. It’s a big enough violation to result in a blacklisting from the engines – something that would surely hurt the Financial Times. FT.com is listed as a news source for both Google and Yahoo news searches, plus FT.com has over 238,000 page listings in Google and 470,000 on Yahoo.
Even if the hidden link was an accident, which I’m not buying, the Financial Times needs to step forward and own up to this mistake. Many people had to be involved for those links to be hidden. At the very least an advertising sales rep, a programmer and a couple managers had to okay those placements.
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