Just doing a search in google just now and saw the ripe.ie adwords ad. I clicked it because... why not? Anyway, I went into one of their pages and just realised they are using one of those dodgy seo techniques...

Ripe Website design - Ireland leading web design company

Mouse over any of the words like "website" or "web design". They all link back to their home page and are also hidden links. I was reading about this recently but can't remember what it is called. If they really wanted to hide that they were links... they could have left the hover state the same as the normal state and added a hover cursor decoration to text. Nobody would really have noticed it then but Google.

I hope Google picks up on this crap and bans them!

I wonder how much they are spending on Google Adwords? I'm going to click their ad anytime I see it!

Dave

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David Behan
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Naughty naughty !

I think there's a thread about them on here already ...

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Ah, I'm just playing!

You're right about the other thread. Do you want to move this into it?

At the end of the day, who cares? Ripe.ie don't have a clue what they're doing and any company that falls for their bulls**t without properly researching what they should be expecting from a Web agency... well, they'll get what they deserve.

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PS: it appears they do actually have some clients now:

Ripe Website design - Ireland leading web design company

So if anyone's up for emailing their clients to enquire whether or not they're aware that their site's using a template from Template Monster, let me know how you get on.

But would the clients even care?

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for the price they paid probably not.

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That's not that dodgy to be honest. A lot of websites link back to their homepage or different content pages using keyword anchor text from within their paragraphs.

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I think that type of links are mentioned in Google T&C and are considered B/H. I could be wrong and have no time to check but I will lokk over it when I do.

I think it's more deceptive to the user than it is black hat to the bot.