Hidden text - Dangerous?

I found a good ranking site having this code

[angiolo]

I found a site having this code after the </HEAD> tag:

<DIV id=yoursitename
style="Blind: -3; LEFT: -140px; VISIBILITY: hidden; OVERFLOW: hidden; WIDTH: 3px; POSITION: absolute; TOP: -140px; HEIGHT: 3px">

keyword1, keyword2....

.. YOUR KEYWORDS HERE ....

<A
href="http://www.yoursite.com/page1.htm">http://www.yoursite.com/page1.htm</A>
<A
href="http://www.yoursite.com/page2.htm">http://www.yoursite.com/page2.htm</A>

.. ALL YOUR INTERNAL SITE LINKS HERE ...

</DIV>

All the keywords and links do not show to visitors.

Is this considered spam? Could it be considered spam by google?

[tedster]

Yes, all forms of hidden text are considered "against the rules" at almost every search engine. Yes, people get away with this some times.

[u4eas]

They talked about this at PubCon yesterday... this will get you unlisted from google, so i wouldnt do it if i were you.

u4ea

[pageoneresults]

Also keep in mind that dhtml menus or other forms of dynamic menus may use css similar to this. So, it may or may not be hidden text.

Yes, it is hidden when you first few the page. But, once you hover over a link, the menu expands and now brings in the content in the hidden div. Or at least that is my understanding of it.

[Chris_R]

As others have mentioned - this will in some cases get you kicked out of google.

Personally - I think this will be difficult to implement without banning some sites by accident - and some sites that shouldn't be (movie sites with spoilers).

The impression I got from pubcon - is you will see this implemented to a large extent soon.

Expect people to get banned - and for google to either fix the mistakes that got innocent people banned - drop it - or change it (to what I think it should be) - just ignore the "invisible" text.

[angiolo]

Hi pageonresults!

> Yes, it is hidden when you first few the page. But, once you hover over a link

In my example all is hidden: nothing show on mousing over.

It is absolute hidden text.

[gingerbreadman]

I think people have mentioned this before but could you justify your use of hidden text to a competitor or a google manual edit?

[tedster]

There are many things a search engine can do that fall in between letting their algo be manipulated and dropping a website altogether. As Chris_R mentioned, they can just detect certain practices and simply ignore that content. Or they might choose a partial demotion but not execute a full ban.

It can be quite difficult to tell if the practices you see on any page are helping, or hurting, or doing nothing at all in either direction. But when a search engine explicitly says they are going to filter for something or other - then that's fair warning, I'd say.

[mozopera]

I worry about this filtering for hidden text. On my sites, I have a DIV that tells Netscape 4.X users that the site is designed for later browsers. This DIV is normally hidden unless the visitor uses Netscape 4.X.

What do you think? Should I remove this DIV?

(The problem with removing it is that the site, while functional, looks really ugly under NN 4.X. I don't want to spend time beautifying it for a dying browser. The message in the DIV at least tells the visitor why.)

[tedster]

Should I remove this DIV?

It's your choice here, mozopera. But I doubt that you have a big worry either way because of this one innocent occurance. Especially because your div DOES become visible under some conditions. And afer all, it's clearly not keyword or link hiding.

On the other hand, I've given up on using warnings on my sites that don't support Netscape 4. Once the decision is made not to support NN4, I am willing to let those users see the evidence of their browser's flaws, if the added functionality benefits the great majority.

Netscape 4 users are already seeing lots of bad news as they browse the web today, I'm sure. So I don't worry about reinforcing the experience. And it the client wants support, I charge more and explain the trade-offs involved.