Search Engine Optimization for Site Owners and Small Businesses

Just over a year ago I posted on the dangers of hidden text and concluded with the advice "…don’t use hidden text to try to improve your rankings".

Here is a practical example of what may happen if you do.

Yesterday John Frost who runs the very popular Disney Blog posted that his blog had been delisted from the Google index and sure enough it had:

Such is the power of popular blogs that within a couple of hours of John’s plea for help their was an explanation and a resolution from none other than Google Engineer and spam fighter in chief, Matt Cutts. He explains in a diplomatic and friendly comment that hidden text was responsible for the ban. Specifically this page code:

<h2 id="banner-description">Informing Disney Fans the World Over with the latest news and updates from all Disney companies, divisions, and related stories. Disney World, Disneyland, Disney Cruises, Disney Animation, Pixar, ESPN, and more are covered in as much detail as I can muster.</h2>

With this in the external CSS file:

#banner-description
{
overflow: hidden;
width: 0;
height: 0;
margin: 0;
padding: 0;
text-indent: -1000em;
}

As it happens this appears to be a generic Typepad problem in that when you set up a Typepad blog you are asked to enter a Weblog description which ends up being hidden by the CSS. However after Matt had pointed it out and John had removed the text, Matt helpfully submitted a reinclusion request.

Matt has gone off to talk to Six Apart the Typepad developers and The Disney Blog will be back in the index sometime next week.

The moral of the story is still the same - don’t use hidden text to try to improve your rankings.

Using submission software is a very bad mistake made by a small minority of site owners. Tempted by sales copy that promises to “Submit Your website to more than 1.2 Million Search Engines, Directories and Link pages” they pay for software that is completely unnecessary and in most cases will have a negative effect.

In practice there are only a handful of search engines that people use and all of those have robots that spider the web looking for new pages and sites. There is absolutely no need to submit your pages to these search engines because they will find you quite quickly if you have a link from at least one site that is in their index already. Of course you should have a lot more than one inbound link!

The disadvantages of using such software is that most of the sites they submit to are there only to collect your email address and then make it available to spammers. So when you purchase the software you are in effect paying to be spammed which is not a good way to spend money.

Here is a section of a page from a site that sells this kind of submission software:
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Hidden text is text which is embedded in the html code and seen by the search engines but not seen by website visitors. Those that use hidden text believe that it can improve their page’s ranking and in some cases it may well appear to do so but the effect is very small.

It is quite easy to hide text as we shall see but all the major search engines advise strongly against doing so, because it reduces the quality of their results. Search engines can detect certain forms of hidden text algorithmically and when they do they will automatically drop the offending site from their index. It is because the search engines regard hidden text as spam and are getting better at detecting it every day that hiding text is a low reward high risk strategy and one never used by professional SEO’s.

The first kind of hidden text is not so much hidden as ignored. This is text placed between comment tags like this <!–This text is a comment–>. Comment tags are actually intended to be used as an aid to whoever is editing the source code at a later date and as such comments are not of course displayed in the browser. Here is a real life example of comment tag spam:
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