Introduction
When you’re trying to find links on a website, there are plenty of ways to do it. You can use your browser’s search bar, read the content on the page, or even look at the site’s source code. But are you looking for hidden links that don’t show up in any other way? That’s where this guide comes in! ( Affordable Web Design with Free Domain and Hosting for Life )
Check for hidden text on the website.
To find hidden links, use your browser’s developer tools to check for them.
In Chrome, you can access the Developer Tools in a few simple steps:
- Right-click anywhere on an empty part of the page and select Inspect Element from the menu that appears (or press Command + Shift + I). This will open up a panel in your browser window that shows you all kinds of information about whatever Element has focus.
- Select Elements or Console at the top of this panel, depending on whether you want to inspect HTML elements or JavaScript code running on the page.
- Click on any element in the preview pane to see its source code displayed in another pane below it—this is where hidden text typically lives! In particular, look for text that has been encoded with base64 encoding (e.g., “data: image/png;base64,”), which is commonly used by spammers who want their dirty links to stay hidden from regular search engines like Google (we’ll talk more about how Google deals with these kinds of things later).
View the source code of a website, scroll through it and look for redirect links.
The first thing to do is to view the website’s source code. This can be done by clicking on View > Source in your browser or pressing Ctrl+U on Windows and Cmd+U on Mac.
Once you’ve opened the source code, scroll through it until you find any redirect links. The redirect links will often be used as JavaScript or HTML tags but might also be included as images or videos.
Right-click using your mouse or trackpad, and select Inspect or View Source.
Inspect is only available on Chrome, while View Source is available on all browsers. Both of these options do the same thing: they allow you to see what’s happening behind a website’s scenes.
View Source is the default option, so if you don’t select anything else, it’ll open up in your browser window as soon as you right-click an image. However, Inspect gives you more control over what gets displayed—it allows you to expand sections like comments and scripts into their separate panels for easier viewing.
Search for the name of the site plus “outbound links.”
A good way to find hidden links is to search for the name of the site plus “outbound links.” This will show you a list of all the links on that page, and when you click on any of them, it will take you to another page with more outbound links. If you keep following these links and clicking through them until it takes longer than five seconds, then there’s something fishy going on!
Look for any signs that the link is a paid placement by looking at the anchor text, location, and surrounding content.
You will want to look at anchor text, location and surrounding content. If a link uses a keyword that does not fit into the general theme of the page, it is on. You can consider it a paid link. For example, if an article about dogs and cats has links pointing to sites selling dog food or cat litter, you might find that those are paid ads rather than real information from another website.
When you doubt whether you’ve found all of a website’s links, search on Google for “site:” followed immediately by the web address (without quotation marks).
When you doubt whether you’ve found all of a website’s links, search on Google for “site.” The phrase ” site:” followed immediately by the web address (without quotation marks) will perform a search only for that site, returning only results containing the exact phrase “site.” This is useful because it returns all links with the site name in their anchor text rather than just links with those words. For example:
- A typical search for this website would return about 4,000 results.
- A search for “site:” followed immediately by this website’s URL returns about 1,300 results.
Conclusion
Hopefully, we’ve given you some great tips on how to find hidden links on your website. And if all else fails, search “site:” followed immediately by the web address (without quotation marks). This should return all links from that site, including external ones. Good luck!
