You would never know by looking at Donald Trump’s campaign site but there’s what the search engine community calls a “black hat” link on it. We discovered this today while looking at the website and passing our mouse scrollers over various areas. In the video that we’ve included below, you’ll notice that we show you the exact spot where the link is located. When you see the arrow hover over the area where there’s a link, you’re able to click on it and it takes you to a new site.
Even though the naked eye cannot see it, the link is 100% there. Where does this link point to? San Antonio based web developer Giles-Parscale. You might be wondering why this is so significant. Web developers sometimes leave rogue links on sites they develop so that the site can pass “link juice” or page ranking on to their own sites. Chances are highly likely that Giles-Parscale anticipated that Trump’s site would become a very high authority website and decided to insert their link in a “harmless” spot on the homepage that no one would notice.
Sorry guys, we noticed and we’re guessing that once the Don notices you may very well hear the phrase “you’re fired.” Someone’s got some explaining to do.
We’ve also taken a look at a few other Trump websites that Giles-Parscale developed where this is NOT occurring.
http://www.trumpwinery.com/
http://www.erictrumpfoundation.com/
Given that this developer works on multiple Trump owned sites, in this instance it appears that they used a black hat technique, possibly without Trumps knowledge, for their own personal benefit (increase search ranking for “San Antonio Web Design” or other keywords they were trying to target).
Check out our video screen shot below and see for yourselves by going to the website here.
