Used style="display:none"

Now bots are all gone

[twist]

After setting up a spider trap from instructions found here on WW I added the following line to my footer to catch spider not using the robots.txt file.

<a style="display:none" href="http://example.com/trap/email.php" onclick="return false">Email</a>

Now, all search engines have stopped coming and my google/yahoo/msn caches are all dated to about the day I added this line of code. About June 6. Before they were caching my site about every 3 days.

I have removed the line but have zero activity of bots visiting my site.

What to do?

[Longhaired Genius]

It's beyond belief that Google/Yahoo/msn would all have the same policy regarding this innocuous scrap of markup. I think your problem (if it's not just a coincidence) must lie elsewhere.

[kaled]

It is reasonable that display:none would be treated as hidden text especially if there is no id="idname" attribute. Without such an attribute, it is clear that the item is never going to be displayed using javascript either.

However, I am inclined to agree with the Genius regarding coincidence, etc.

Incidentally, I place a robots exclusion meta tag on pages with hidden parts just to be ultra-safe.

Kaled.

[Span]

Must be something wrong with the spider trap. Make sure you haven't blocked any important bots in your .htaccess or robots.txt.

[monkeythumpa]

It sounds like your robots.txt is set up incorrectly and you are banning all robots.

[twist]

I changed it to this last night,

<!-- <a href="http://example.com/trap/email.php">Email</a> -->

Which I was told will also be followed by the bad bots but the good bots will ignore.

Coincidence or not, today my pages indexed on google doubled. It could have been taking away the display:none or it could have just been a coincdence but i'm not going to switch it back to find out. Maybe someone else will test it some day.