First we had WordPress which sported tons of hidden spammer links by ingenuous use of negative CSS positioning. Then Syndic8 decided not to be left behind and joined the fray. Later both of the sites were somewhat forced to remove the offending links due to falling Google rank (read zero) and possibly to some extent due to the unwanted attention it generated.

And now we have Financial Times, a respected publication which resorted to adding hidden links (white text on white background) to its pages. News.com reported:

Ted McGaffin, an online marketing consultant in Ayr, Scotland, was poking around on FT.com as part of a competitive analysis for a client. A Web search indicated that dozens of pages on FT.com had links to Moneysupermarket.com, a price comparison site. Such links would help Moneysupermarket.com's rankings in Web search results.

But when McGaffin went to one of the pages on FT.com, no such link could be seen. A look at the underlying HTML code revealed that the link was there, but it was invisible to the eye, made to appear as white text on a white background.

The best part of the fiasco was the response from FT:

Jolie Hunt, a spokeswoman for the Financial Times in New York, said the site had a business partnership with Moneysupermarket.com, and that the invisibility had been a matter of aesthetics. "They just didn't want to clog up the real estate with an overt link," she said. "As soon as we figured out it was something we weren't supposed to do, we took it right down immediately."

I am very much impressed by their "aesthetic" sense. They did not want to "clog up the real estate with an overt link".

Did their usability experts suggest that having invisible links are the best way to direct human traffic from their site to Moneysupermarket.com?