Hidden Text and Search Engines

Hidden text in Search Engine Optimisation is any textual content that is invisible to human visitors but visible to search engines. Hidden text has several uses, from disguising spoilers for readers to hiding data from users. However, it is most commonly used by web designers to load a webpage with more keywords and key phrases to rank higher in search engines for those phrases, without letting your visitors see the text.

Even if it can temporarily improve your pages rank in the Search Engine Listings, we still should not to use it. Most major search engines will identify the hidden text as being spam. If a webpage is found using hidden text, search engines will give it much lower relevance in the SERPs, or even worse, your website could be permanently banned. Google’s Matt Cutts said, “Hidden text is also not fair to other sites that try to compete for similar queries without hiding words from users.”

We have had potential clients contact us because they have received an e-mail saying:
“Dear site owner or webmaster,
While we were indexing your webpages, we detected that some of your pages
were using techniques that were outside our quality guidelines, which can
be found here: http://www.google.com/webmasters/guidelines.html

In order to preserve the quality of our search engine, we have temporarily
removed some webpages from our search results. Currently pages from
yourdomain.co.uk are scheduled to be removed for at least 30 days.

Specifically, we detected the following practices on your webpages:
* hidden text on yourdomain.co.uk:”

Google and Yahoo have a very clear policy about the use of hidden text.

• From: Google Information for Webmasters-Webmaster Guidelines
  “Quality Guidelines – Specific Recommendations: Avoid hidden text or hidden links.”
• From: Yahoo! Help- Search Help- Search Spam & Deletions- What are your guidelines on spam?
  “What Yahoo! Considers Unwanted: The use of text that is hidden from the user…”

So what kind of text should we avoid?

• Colour matching-using same or similar font colour as background colour, which is the oldest and simplest method to create hidden text.
• Hiding a div-creating a div with all the keyword content in and hiding the entire div using CSS. Either by making the div invisible, or by positioning it with a large negative value in either the x or y axis so that it doesn’t appear on screen.

Lili Gong
Seo Programmer