It’s a very deliberate placement. So, I tend to agree that it’s a paid placement. May just send BJ an email myself, see what he’s got available

This reminds me of a mistake a person who was working for me at AA was doing. It was a reciprocal link job on clients about 4 years back and she was copying and pasting the same information to each client’s site. Well, it just so happened she copied over an image to another client. So the one client had 200 links from other client’s who also had a marketing package. Needless to say, her rankings and backlinks went through the roof.

Having said all that, this also could have been a “copy/paste” error as well. You never know of course unless you talk with either the advertiser or publisher.

There could be a another possibility, what it the site was hacked and the link was put there by the hacker.

Now I know that may not be very realistic. Edmonds.com as we all knows is also another reputable site but hacking sites for links happens every day.

We are looking into how this link got on this page, but we suspect that it is a simple copy and paste from another template that links to us … we are trying to locate that template.

I would like to know who is in charge of SEO for Discovery Education?

Thanks,
Scott Polk
Edmunds.com

I disagree. I would want hidden links for any of my clients.

I completely understand where you are coming from and I think a lot of people feel the same way you do.

I honestly don’t think a link like this is hurting edmunds at all. I really don’t see the issue with obtaining links like this. If a link like this would hurt a client then of course I don’t think any of us would want that.

One of the best ways to build your inbound links is to be as discrete and natural as possible. This link has been around for over a year that I know of. Seems like its passing link love and I honestly do not see anything unethical about it at all.

Its not truly hidden its just an image link. I think my title may be a tad to sensationalized

Interesting find — question for you.

The page where the ‘hidden’ link is located does not show any page strength?

Page Strength: 1 / 10 - SEOmoz
Google PR ToolBar: 0

Even though this obviously looks questionable, is there any value in this link?

I think you are asking the right question. I could have sworn this page at one time had page rank within google but because its not there now lets just pretend it never did.

Here are the positive things I am looking at.

1. Page is indexed within google so we know spiders are crawling it and counting links.

2. I really don’t hold to much value in PR. I have seen tons of sites rank higher then others who have a better PR then them. To me, page rank is pretty dead - bold statement!

3. Google is not showing backlinks but as we know they dont like to show people like us that kinda info. However Yahoo is showing backlinks and when doing a backlink search on edmunds this is one of the first backlinks.

4. This link is coming off of a page that has high authority and page rank within google. Its a trusted site and a way to pass authority and trust rank to another site is to have authority and trust rank sites pass link value to you.

So my answer to this question is yes I see value to a link on this page. Yes their could be more value like anchor text on the link ect but there is absolute value in my opinion.

Interesting the page is already grey bared on my system here. I wonder why that might be?

“I really don’t hold to much value in PR.”

Lack of TBPR can sometimes mean that 1) backlinks to a URL is untrusted - if they are trusted, they would pass PageRank 2) domain doesn’t have much juice. For example, a TBPR 9 directory will have decent TBPR category pages, while a TBPR 1 directory may not have any pages indexed at all. And if backlinks into a domain is untrusted, then outlinks from it to a completely unrelated site has a higher probability of not passing any value.

“This link is coming off of a page that has high authority”

Assuming its a high authority site (though we all have different metrics in deciding authority), an authoritative site can have links that are completely untrusted by Google. (e.g. SER’s sponsored links, or Graywolf’s paid links on his home page). The question is whether the link is easily detectable? Absolutely. It’s not contextual. It has no anchor/TITLE attribute text. It links to an off-topic site. And if edmunds.com’s link profile is dirty, it makes it even easier for Google to draw the right conclusion.

Just because a link is hard to spot with the human eye doesn’t mean its hard for machines to detect.

So without any anchor text the link is useless, at least for improving rankings. And it won’t confer any trust to edmunds.com either IMO, because the link is manipulative and its easy to detect.

“Interesting the page is already grey bared on my system here. I wonder why that might be?”

The word on the street is TBPR update might be afoot; its probably not the best time to be looking at the toolbar.

Just because the link doesn’t have anchor text, doesn’t mean its useless for ranking purposes. The link juice from non-anchor text links pours onto the Title tags, which does boost rankings - counting towards “authority status”. That is a general statement, not specifying this case above.

Adam, that’s not what I said. Obviously a link’s worth is more than just anchor text. I said the link apparently doesn’t pass either authority or PageRank so if it had anchor text/TITLE attribute then it would at least be of some use. But it doesn’t have that either - which is why the link is useless in my book.

seems like just another implementation of a million dollar pixel page