Hidden Text? Part of the game or a major faux pas?
-
Hey all...
I've been doing some competitive analysis lately on different niches in different cities, and upon looking at source code have noticed MANY sites(typically 2-3 of the top listed sites in each niche) who have hidden text, blocked by a box/logo, colored the same as the background, or both.
Is this a typical practice?
My understanding is Google seriously frowns on this, so is it worth reporting competitors who are doing such things?
I don't see any grey areas in this matter and think it's a serious violation, but here these sites are at the top.
-
Major No-No.
Most likely they will eventually be found out and knocked down. It is painful to wait for that day to occur, I know. Just write more and better content
-
With a few of the sites I am thinking of, they have done an excellent job with SEO and the site actually looks great.
They have done hidden text in ADDITION to all the best practices which seems to have put them over the top.
Two sites in particular, with hidden text, have not been punished in over two years. Go figure.
-
Oy.... this is not good at all. I understand why people do this, but I don't understand how they sleep at night knowing this just isn't ethical. Funny part is, if they got their content in place properly they wouldn't have to resort to these sorts of practices anyway.
-
Major faux pas, never part of the game.
It's definitely a serious violation and at some point there will be a penalty for it. It will arrive in a spam workers list of sites to go through some when, and they'll see it and slap it. There's just not enough spam workers for that to be fast, and maybe it hasn't been reported enough or even at all to get into their lists yet.
It's too much of an old trick to ever work, and keyword density, etc... doesn't do squat now anyway so there's no point.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Too much duplicate text?
Last December we started losing traffic to our website https://www.spec.lt (This is in Lithuanian).
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | anonimas
The thing we did was to every single company page we added QR Code. For example: https://www.spec.lt/imone/onninen-uab (at the bottom of this page). We added some text that goes with it. As you can see here http://imgur.com/a/beaYm
The only difference between those texts is the company name. Can this be the reason why google reduced our positions ? (We didn't lose any of traffic in categories/search/articles - only in company pages). A lot of companies that are new or bancrupt have little to no text at all. Except for this text about QR code, like here for example - https://www.spec.lt/imone/mazoji-bendrija-transportas-2017 Can this be the reason? Or any other on page errors that you see.
Thank you0 -
Anyways to pull anchor text?
Hi guys, So basically i have a list of URLs/Domains and there backlinks (example: http://s29.postimg.org/ujxm0c4lj/screenshot_677.jpg) but i'm missing anchor text. Can anyone recommend any tools which can scan a backlink, locate the URL/Domain on the page and then pull the anchor text? Cheers, Chris <colgroup><col width="548"><col width="884"></colgroup>
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jayoliverwright
| | |1 -
I Need to put static text every page (600 words) need advice
i need to put static text (about our company brief 600 words) to all content section of pages of our website. I know it's bad for SEO Duplicate Content. But i need to tell google this is my static content and do NOT crawl it. Or something like that. canonical is for whole page but i need to set it up for certain positions of every page. is that possible?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | nopsts0 -
CSS Hidden DIVs - not collapsable content. Amber light?
I'm in the planning stage of a new ecommerce page. To reduce duplication issues, my page will be static with 20% of the page compiled of dynamic fields. So when a user selects a size, or color, the dynamic fields are the only ones that change as the rest of the content is the same. I can keep a static URL and not worry about duplication issues. Focus can be on strengthening this single URL with rich schema, reviews, and backlinks. We're going to cache a default page so for crawlers, the dynamic field doesn't appear empty. My developer said they can cache the page with all the variants of the dynamic fields, and use hidden DIVs to hide them from the user. This way, the load speed can be high, and search engines might crawl those keywords too. I'm thinking about and going.."wait a minute, that's a good idea..but would a search engine think I am hidding content and give me a penalty?". The hidden content is relevant to the page and it only appears according to the drop down to make the user experience more "friendly". What do you think? Use hidden DIV or use javascript to not allow bots to crawl the hidden data at all?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Bio-RadAbs0 -
Moving Part of a Website to a Subdomain to Remove Panda Penalty?
I have lots of news on my website and unlike other types of content, news posts quickly become obsolete and get a high bounce rate. I have reasons to think that the news on my website might be partly responsible for a Panda penalty so I'm not sure. There are over 400 news posts on the blog from the last 4 years so that's still a lot of content. I was thinking of isolating the news articles on a subdomain (news.mywebsite.com) If the news play a part in the Panda penalty, would that remove it from the main domain?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | sbrault740 -
Anchor text
my website hit by penguin update on april; i check my anchor text and found that i had 1790 anchor links for " air conditioning nyc" i erase them almost a month ago but it still shows on the website report. how long it take seomoz see the changes and what about google. if someone have any idea how can i bring my site back to the top pages. thank you
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | eoberlender0 -
Using Images Instead of Text to Control Keywords on Page
We have recently updated a key page on our website. It is a template page that is used many times to display search results. The words "price", "revenue", and "cash flow", "not disclosed" are used for each listing on the page -- to minimize their impact on keyword density on the page we used images for these words. Here you can see some examples: http://www.businessbroker.net/State/Florida-Businesses_For_Sale.aspx http://www.businessbroker.net/City/Los Angeles-Businesses_For_Sale.aspx http://www.businessbroker.net/Industry/Auto_Car_Wash-Businesses_For_Sale.aspx You will note these words on this page are images and not regular text. We are certainly not doing this to "dupe" the visitors or Google -- we just want to ensure that each page has keywords pertinent to what the page is about. Bottom line question -- is this an OK practice? Are we running any risk with Google by doing this? I'm particularly nervous these days with all of the Google changes. Your thoughts and guidance on this issue would be much appreciated. Thanks. MWM
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MWM37720 -
Major Website Migration Recovery Ideas?
Since starting our business back in 2006 we've gone through alot of branding, and as a result URL and architectual migrations. This has always something that has been driven by usability, brand awareness and technical efficiency reasons, while knowing that there would be SEO hits to take from it....but ultimately hoping to have a much stronger foundation from an SEO perspective in the long run. Having just gone through our most recent (and hopefully final) migration, we are now about 15% down on traffic (although more like 35% - 40% in real terms when seasonality is stripped out). Below is a timeline to our structural history: 2007 - 2009 = We operated as a network of inidividual websites which started as 1, www.marbellainfo.com, but grew to 40, with the likes of www.thealgarveinfo.com, www.mymallorcainfo.com, www.mytenerifeinfo.com, www.mymaltainfo.com etc.. 2009 - 2010 = We decided to consolitdate everything onto 1 single domain, using a sub-domain structure. We used the domain www.mydestinationinfo.com and the subdomains http://marbella.mydestinationinfo.com, http://algarve.mydestinationinfo.com etc.. All old pages were 301 redirected to like for like pages on the new subdomains. We took a 70% drop in traffic and SERPS disappeared for over 6 months. After 9 months we had recovered back to traffic levels and similar rankings to what we had pre-migration. Using this new URL structure, we expanded to 100 destinations and therefore 100 sub-domains. 2011 = In April 2011, having not learnt our lesson from before :(, we undwent another migration. We had secured the domain name www.mydestination.com and had developed a whole new logo and branding. With 100 sub-domains we underwent a migration to the new URL and used a sub-directory folder. So this time www.myalgarveinfo.com had gone to <a></a>http://algarve.mydestinationinfo.com and was now www.mydestination.com/algarve. No content or designs were changed, and again we 301 re-directed pages to like for like pages and with this we even made efforts to ask those linking to us to update their links to use our new URL's. The problem: The situation we fine ourselves in now is no where near as bad as what happend with our migration in 2009/2010, however, we are still down on traffic and SERPS and it's now been 3 months since the migration. One thing we had identified was that our re-directs where going through a chain of re-directs, rather than pointing straight to the final urls (something which has just been rectified). I fear that our constant changing of URL's has meant we have lost out in terms of the passing over of link juice from all the old URL's and loss of trust with Google for changing so much. Throughout this period we have grown the content on our site by almost 2x - 3x each year and now have around 100,000 quality pages of unique content (which is produced by locals on the ground in each destination). I'm hoping that someone in the SEOmoz Community might have some ideas on things we may have slipped up on, or ways in which we can try and recover a little faster and actually get some growth, as opposed to working hard and waiting a while just for another recovery. Thanks Neil
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Neil-MyDestination0