Opinion? Yes.

Don't do it.

Many SE's have a "report spam" url and a lot of your competitors will use it if they spot you using deceptive practices. This goes beyond just CSS and into javascript also for the same ends of hiding or deceiving SE's for better rankings.

My thoughts? Okay.

If you are in my neck of the woods, and I see it ... I report it. I make no bones about that too.

The unfortunate thing is though, by the time that it gets noticed and the time that it gets removed is sometimes a couple of weeks to a month. That is enough time to do the damage of some loss of sales.

After the site goes down ... they pop up somewhere else and we start the whole thing over again. Sometimes Google will pick up on the practice well enough ... but then they devise another method and start the game all over again.

Eventually though, a lot of these methods will go the way of the white on white hidden text type of practice. All SE's will become savvy enough to sniff them out, that is inevitable. They can only become aware of some of these practices by individual site owners reporting them.

But to get back to the actual question that tangot raised, it all boils down to intent. If your intention is to make a more aesthetic look to your pages, then I see no problems in using text links without underlining, different colors, etc. If it is obvious enough that they are links, then go for it.

If you feel that you may get penalized for your .css stylesheets by using some of these methods, then put all of your stylesheets into a seperate directory and disallow all spiders access to that directory in your robots.txt file. The SE's will not penalize you for doing this ... it would require a competitor to report you for it (highly unlikely) and for Google or another SE to actually view your files manually to make a determination on whether or not your intent was to deceive their spiders.

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