I have two anchors positioned absolute on top of an image, the links are clickable in other browsers (Chrome, FF, Safari) but not in IE (tested in 8 & 9 so far)

The strange thing is if I give the links a background-color they are clickable, however if the background-color is set to transparent (which is what I want) they are no longer clickable, I've also tried setting zoom:1 but no luck. I guess the hasLayout bit in IE went away with IE 8/9 so guessing zoom doesn't matter now for this kind of issue.

Any ideas to make these links show up in IE 8/9 with a transparent bg?

Here's the fiddle I've been working with: jsFiddle example

I have the following HTML layout:

<div id="content"> <img src="http://placehold.it/724x300" width="724" height="300" alt="woot" /> <div id="countdown"></div> <a id="link1" href="http://www.stackoverflow.com" title="link1"></a> <a id="link2" href="http://www.stackoverflow.com" title="link2"></a> </div>

and CSS: