Free online services usually comes with an attachment. Usually you are required to place their banners, buttons, etc on your website; stats counter can be quite a good example here. Here’s a trick, rather evil, where you can continue to use them, but made their banner or buttons invisible to your visitors while service providers will still think you are linking back to them.

Throw object off screen with CSS

There is a control in CSS call the text-indent. When text-indent is used on particular object with negetive values it will throw it off screen make it invisible unless CSS is disabled. You’ll need a little bit CSS knowledge here to make it works. Here’s how you do it:

1. Look for the object you intended to hide (image, button, text, etc), identify their class name.
2. Insert the following CSS

   text-indent:-999px;
   z-index:-1;
   

3. Done, object maintains on website but is thrown off screen making it invisible to your visitors.

Unethical and Evil

Many may find doing this is unethical and evil, especially if you are using a service you should give credit back to the provider. Well, I’ll not go against it and I’m not encouraging you to use it. As the matter of fact, the reason why I’m revealing such method is because I’ve seen webmasters using them. Just in case you wonder why some objects/content shows up in source code but not on the website, now you know why. Anyway, I’m using this to hide a stats counter. Let me know you can find out which it is :-)

Posted by hongkiat in Web Tricks, at 06.11.07