Hidden text that's not really "hidden" - seo

[ricardomargalho]

Hi guys,

I have a question for you about a thing I saw on a website.

I've attached the prints.
They have like "hidden text". It must be good for indexation, they can
target a lot of important keywords in it, and still keep the website
"clean".
Is this penalized by google if discovered? Do they see this as black hat?

Thanks,

Ricardo

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[MarieHaynes]

I don't think this is black hat stuff.  It looks like some type of rotating banner like lots of sites have.  Now, if the so called "hidden" text is just a random list of keywords then this would look more manipulative.

In my mind, hidden text is more like when someone displays the text off of the screen with CSS or uses white text on a white background.

[RyanKent]

When deciding if a technique is black hat, we need to specifically state which one of Google's Guidelines the presentation violates. Google's Guidelines are broken in to three areas: Design and Content Guidelines, Technical Guidelines, and Quality Guidelines. A quick review of the first two areas shows the page does not violate those guidelines. The question is whether this method violations Google's Quality Guidelines.

The only specific Quality Guidelines one would suggest this site violates is "hidden text and links". Clearly, the method used here does not violate that guideline. From the Google site:

http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=66353

Hiding text or links in your content can cause your site to be perceived as untrustworthy since it presents information to search engines differently than to visitors. Text (such as excessive keywords) can be hidden in several ways, including:

• Using white text on a white background
• Including text behind an image
• Using CSS to hide text
• Setting the font size to 0

So none of the "specific guidelines" are violated. The next question is whether the site violates any of the "basic principles". There is only one which causes concern:

Avoid tricks intended to improve search engine rankings. A good rule of thumb is whether you'd feel comfortable explaining what you've done to a website that competes with you. Another useful test is to ask, "Does this help my users? Would I do this if search engines didn't exist?"

The question is whether a Google Spam Team member would manually penalize a site solely for this particular issue. The spam team members are highly calibrated and must follow strict guidelines. In my experience they would not presently penalize such a page, but I would love to receive a definitive response. Even if the question was asked directly, we would likely receive general info rather then "yes this violates our guidelines" or "no, it does not". It does not seem to go far enough to violate the guidelines.

Either way, I would state my belief the presentation on this site (scasino.com) is not helpful for users and should not be used in its present format. If it was a rotating banner that automatically cycled through the 5 pages, then clearly it would be fine. The only reason the question arises is the user needs to take an action, clicking one of the numbers, in order for the content to display.

Google has come a long way recently. With their "Above The Fold" update and other changes, I am confident Google understands what content is immediately visible on the page, what content the user is likely to engage with (i.e. scroll down on the page) and what content users are unlikely to engage with (such as pressing these numbers).

I don't believe much in "grey hat". Something either complies with Google Guidelines, or it does not. With that said, this particular issue is subject to the interpretation of Google as to how likely a user is to interact with this setup, and whether they believe this technique was done deliberately to manipulate search rankings.

In summary, my response is NO, it would not draw a manual penalty.

[rmontanez]

I agree with Host1.

Stay away from these practices.

[Host1]

Yes, this is seen as black hat by google and will be penalized.

See http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=66353