If a website, lets say a website design Company has created a widget for contact us widget, which is being used by multiple other website. In that particular contact widget if they put their link with anchor text with hidden attribute, should they penalized or awarded coz many authority websites are using them,
For example such structure -
<a href=“https://www.websiteaddress/” title=“Anchor text1” alt=“anchor text2” target=“_blank”>Anchor Text 3</a>
e.g such structure is present at /blog(.)fairfield(.)edu/stagtracks/.
Here contact us widget has been used from third party.
Is such type of manipulation is allowed?
Google webmaster says using hidden links or text can cause penalty to websites, such can be dangerous for whom - The website who is using this widget or to provider of that widget?
What if they (who has created the widget) turn them visible?
A hidden link is one that isn’t available for most users because it has been ‘hidden’, usually by CSS. That’s what Google is trying to clamp down on. If you’re using display:none; or visibility:hidden;, or positioning off-screen or making foreground and background colours the same, you may be at risk of being considered as having hidden content - there are legitimate uses, such as image replacement and drop-down menus, which you won’t be penalised for, but hiding text for other reasons could put you on dodgy grounds.
There is no alt on an <a…> tag, you can only use it on <img…> tags. If the title attribute appears to be relevant and fits with the context and destination of the link then you should be fine (although Google doesn’t pay a whole lot of attention to the title attribute on links so it won’t get you much benefit), but if it appears to be keyword-stuffed and not relevant or in context then Google will justifiably treat you as a spammer.