Hidden Text (Revisited)
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.
TheDisneyBlog said,
January 10, 2007 @ 5:26 pm
I wanted to thank you for posting about my Saga. I’ve posted a summary and some lessons learned here:
http://www.thedisneyblog.com/tdb/2007/01/google_delistin.html
-John
oronm said,
February 17, 2007 @ 2:56 pm
what puzzles me the most : How does google know wether the hidden text represents a graphic headline or is just a black hat trick ?
i know they are scanning css now BUT what if the background image for the headline isn’t given to the H2 (in some cases i give it to the wrapper div for more control).
Any thougnts ?
duz said,
February 17, 2007 @ 11:56 pm
That is a good question oronm and I don’t know the answer at the moment.
randie said,
July 31, 2007 @ 3:34 pm
Hidden text is still almost a regular practice for some webmasters. Especially in my country, Turkey. These webmasters do it for a good reason though: You can spam with literally any method and get away with it. These codes go unnoticed by Google. I don’t understand why Google should index text of 1 pixel, and send visitors to that spammed page just because that 1-px keyword is there. This is 2007 not 1998. Consider this : http://www.modernperdesistemleri.com/resim_galerisi.htm
This site, while unbelievable, ranks #1 for a rather competetive keyword.
Reporting cheaters is the only way left but these reports are never reviewed, at least in last 2 years. Never heard any Turkish site got punished that way either.
duz said,
August 8, 2007 @ 3:26 pm
I agree randie. Google does not hand review spam reports because they would have to double their staff! The spam reports go into a database which is used for testing the spam detection component of the algo.