How does it impact SEO for Google and other search engines if you . . .
 

How does it impact SEO if you have like a 1x1 pixel gif linking to something?

I know some people think that sort of backlink will help in the search engines and some people think that sort of thing will get you heavily penalized in the search engines, especially Google.

What are you all's opinions on this?

My advice: don't do it.

it is spammy.. same as doing hidden text links. btw, did you get my email? we were having problems with it.

"The Band - Don't do it"

That sounds like black hat to me.

As far as google is concerned, if an SEO technique is deviant, misleading, or dishonest in any way, rest assured they are already working on a way to lower ranks of sites using those techniques.

They talked about that in their groups the other day... Basically they already have a system in place to ban you for it. But they wouldn't say what the threshold is... as in would it take 5 or 6 sites doing this on the same IP... 5 or 6 sites on different IP's linked together with this method.. etc...

that is sooo not a good thing to do

You won't find out by asking. 95% of seo statements are recycled maybe's and if's from people who have no clue. Try it out instead.

It doesn't really matter what you do until you get noticeable in the rankings.
Then other webmaster WILL report you if you do something fishy.
As soon as there is a Google review (if there is) your site will be toast. Just flood them with junk complaints so it takes a little longer for them to review ;)

So, if you have domains to spare, do it, if not, dont. Eventually you'll get caught but it might still be worth it if you can just rinse/repeat without any significant cost.

Not the best idea.
But take a risk if you want.

It's not something I want to do. I don't do a lot of SEO. I just try to make good sites and good affiliate tools and the search engines are generally kind to us.

I had people from another company trying to kind of strongarm me into putting a link of this type up for them and it sounded kind of shady to me, but they were so insistent that I wondered if they were being more reasonable than I thought.

I'm sure they are able to detect it easilly and penalize you for it, it's not exactly hard to get the width and height of attributes of the image...

If you want to be sneaky, create invisible layers with css instead...

I can't see anything positive at all from doing this. Either they are using it as a web bug to gather info on your sites visitors or they want a free backlink. Referrer spammers used to do this a while back so I am pretty sure the SE's are wise to 1x1 non spacer gifs that are not part of a URL from an established Affiliate or Stats program.

even if a site like that has PR10, it is actually spreading it on too many pages!
this is missinterpretation of a good inbound link... :D

would a stats counter be penalised you think?

Avoid "dense" javascript, with multiple server-side file-calls.


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