Linking to Social Media Sites Waste Link Benefit

Comment on Google Authorship Tutorial by SEO Dave.

Although you are correct about wasting link benefit by linking sitewide to social media sites like Facebook, Twitter etc… look again at the social media links on this site, none are ‘real’ links.

Both sets of social media links are using the Stallion Link Cloaking feature, those links are invisible to Google and other search engines. Note you can have the links pass PR, though not a very good idea.

View source of the whole page, not just the bio box by selecting the content and viewing selection source: there’s an interesting ‘bug’ when you “View Selection Source” in Firefox, it shows a mashed version of the cloaked link code (that search engines see as text) and what the javascript outputs to a browser with javascript turned on. You can also test with javascript turned off, you’ll find the social media clickable image links are no longer clickable, just images.

Stallion SEO Advanced Options:

Cloak Affiliate Links ON
Cloak Bio and Profile Links ON

If a search engine spider simulator is reporting the links as valid it’s a faulty search engine simulator, although Google tries to read some javascript there’e no evidence they can read this sort of javascript, it’s an external js file for starters. Without specifically adding “look for this javascript and do the following” Google will not be able to read those links, unless this technique becomes the norm I don’t think Google will add something to their algo to account for this code.

Google reads those links as an image surrounded by a span tag, not an image link.

David