Transcript:

Let’s talk about ghost links what are ghost links these are links that people try to use to gain the system the search engines by putting them on their website maybe stacking a bunch of keyword links in there that match the same color of the link to the background of the website so you can’t you can’t see them until you hover your mouse over them now I just came across a website I’m doing SEO for the site and the owner had a bunch of ghost links down in the footer of all the different markets that he wanted to rank for he had landing pages that these linked out to on the website you know this the name of the service that he has and then the city that was in and he had like probably like eight or 10 of these links all in the footer and this is a real problem because Google will actually penalize your website uh for for this tactic this is considered what is called a black hat SEO technique or like a bad SEO technique that’s something that used to work back in the early 2000s or even in the ’90s this was a super popular technique that people would do they would fill up a whole page full of ghost links that the most visitors didn’t see but they were trying to gain the search engines nowadays the search engine can tell when you’re using the same color of the link as the same color as the background and it will automatically penalize your website so I told him this is one of the first things we got to do right away when we start this SEO is we need to change those links and I was telling them you know what I would recommend is changing them to White because it was like blue white on Blue so they’re they’re super visible you can see them if he wants to hide them you know cuz maybe he doesn’t like the fact that there’s all these service names with with cities you know maybe it looks too busy or whatever then we can certainly put them in a drop down list or something like that but the the goal is to make it so they’re user accessible so when you when you hide when you have ghost links they’re not user accessible and that’s why Google penalizes you for it plus it’s trying to game the system and Google doesn’t want anybody gaming it search engines you need to be able to get there through white hat white hat activities which is like valuable activities that are good for the web and ghost links are not good for the web so I want to make this video if you’re thinking of using ghost links or you have ghost links on your website right now this is something you need to change immediately It’s really hurting you quite a bit and just go ahead and you know like if you have a ton of links there you need to maybe consolidate them into a list or you know or just have a few of the main keywords that you want to rank for it doesn’t really help you to go crazy with all these links anyways you really should be targeted to one or two main keywords that you’re trying to focus on and then make other Pages like from a drop down in your menu or there’s ways to do it so you don’t have to ghost link and and basically try to gain the search engines so hopefully this is helpful and enlightening I’m working right now on fixing uh that gentleman’s website to make sure there’s no more ghost links and if you need help with your website to figure out if those are ghost links on there and how to fix those ghost links you can certainly reach out to me I’d love to help you out I’d love to analyze your website for SEO and see what kind of issues might be lurking there that we can fix and get your website ranking really well this is Joe with Sky Point Studios thank you so much as always for watching my videos and I’m going to catch you on the next one.

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