I've been working on a client's website, and I recently noticed something strange on one of our competitor's homepages. Basically, they have a paragraph or two hidden behind javascript. Within that paragraph, they have three links, where two of those links are seemingly pointing to two other competitor's sites. Instead of trying to explain in words, I'll write an example of what I'm talking about to give you a better picture:

We'll call the site with the above mentioned links "competitor1". We'll call the additional sites both competitor2 and competitor3 respectively.

Example:

<p>Here at <a href="http://www.competitor2.com/" mce_href="http://www.competitor2.com/" mce_serialized="12dfhlj"><u></u></a>, <a href="http://www.competitor1.com/">competitor1</a>widgets we try to do our best to fullfill all of your needs in the best way possible.</p>
<p>If you'd like to learn more about our widgets, then please navigate our site here at <a href="http://www.competitor1.com/" mce_href="http://www.competitor3.com/" mce_serialized="13dfljdf"><u>competitor1.com</u></a>

At first glance it might look like I've made a mistake with the first link, but that is exactly how I see it on the site...pretty weird

So in a nutshell,

1. We have competitor1 with two paragraphs of text hidden behind javascript.

2. Within those two paragraphs we have a total of three links. The first link looks like this:

<a href="http://www.competitor2.com/" mce_href="http://www.competitor2.com/" mce_serialized="12dfhlj"><u></u></a>

*As you can see it has zero anchor text, and points to competitor2's website.

The second link looks like this:

<a href="http://www.competitor1.com/">competitor1</a>

*This one seems legit, nothing strange about this one.

The last link looks like this:

<a href="http://www.competitor1.com/" mce_href="http://www.competitor3.com/" mce_serialized="13dfljdf"><u>competitor1.com</u></a>

*Now this one has the regular "href" pointing at competitor1's homepage, but the "mce_href" is pointing at competitor3' site. And the anchor text is also "competitor1.com"

From what I'm guessing. This is an attempt to pass link juice to both competitor2 and competitor3 without broadcasting it "out load" if you know what I mean. If that is the case, then that would mean that these sites are not competitor's at all, and must have some sort of agreement going on.

?

[edited by: caveman at 6:12 am (utc) on Feb. 6, 2008]