pmkpmk - 8:39 pm on Jul 24, 2007 (gmt 0)

Maybe you can share your opinions on the matter?

I apologize for the brevity of my previous comment. One should never write comments when being in a bad mood.

My opinion is that I welcome that search engines try to detect black hat practices, but that I am worried some pretty valid and good techniques might be seen as black hat by a fully automated process. I myself use - rather successfully - a combination of display:none and JavaScript to prevent spam harvesters from prying email addresses from my sites. So basically each and every page has one instance of display:none in a JS context on it.

However I never liked it, but I am lacking a better tool for that purpose. My sites and pages do good in the major SE's though, so obviously using that technique did not raise a black-hat flag, or at least did not push me past the threshold. But I don't know what multiple display:none instances might cause.

On the other hand display:none is a pretty old black hat technique. I'm sure there's more sophisticated ways today, so maybe the SE's are a bit more lenient with it nowadays? But then again - what better to stop wannabe black hats dead in their tracks as to severly punish the oldest tricks in the repertoire?