Penalised for window.status or window.self?

[rogoff]

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has anyone else heard that you can be penalised in google rankings for hiding the actual URL in a link with window.status or self.status?

[morleymouse]

i've heard mumblings about it before, but not anything in detail

adsense ads set the window status so if google did penalised for using it id expect them to stop setting it on the adsense ads

[rogoff]

your right about the adsense ads but i'm not sure google necessarily have to practice what they preach. after all, they have no intention of getting their adsense ads indexed in their search engine (they're rely on JavaScript which excludes them anyway).

this is from Matt Cutts talking about a specific example - "The status bar gets set to empty using the onMouseOver action, so when you mouse over the link, you don’t see that it goes anywhere. And the style of the link is set so that the cursor doesn’t change when you mouse over the link as well. In my opinion, this is a good example of a link that crosses over into deceptiveness and violates our quality guidelines."
http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/hidden-links/

what do you reckon? this is not the only time i've read this sort of comment. i'm taking them off my site just in case.

[morleymouse]

hm you'd like to think they practice what they preach though.

I know they dont get indexed and use JS to pull in an iframe but again, if they are trying to set standards, say whats deceptive and what isnt they they should do the same, not for high rankings or whatever just for transparancies sake.

Depends how they are used, maybe if google detects your setting the status bar to nothing you should be penalised? Personally I've only ever used them with things such as 'click here' or 'to visit www.merchant.com click here' which I dont see as deceptive, and I've never hid a link by changing the mouseover curser style.

If they are trying to combat people hiding links by now showing that it is a link, ie. no underline, same colour, no curser styel change, no status bar change then fair enough.

[rogoff]

true - you would hope that they're not hypocritical. although i've just realised that they sort of break their own rules with the sponsored links in their search results. the URL that's displayed to the user is often not the same as the actual URL that's used for the link.

their guidelines state "Don't deceive your users or present different content to search engines than you display to users". it's not quite the same thing but they are presenting different links to users than the ones that are actually used.

i've been using window.status to display the destination website url in the status bar instead of the affiliate link. but i think i'm going to stop doing that now. might be over reacting but i don't think it's worth the risk.

[cat]

If you are displaying the final destination URL, there is no need to change it.
Or raise the question on
http://groups.google.com/group/Google_Webmaster_Help

[rogoff]

having asked the same question on other boards, i feel slightly re-assured that this may not be an issue after all. i'm going to leave things as they are unless i come across this again from a more authoritative source.

[JasonD]

It doesn't matter what you think the intent of using it is for, what matters is what the algorithm thinks the intent is.