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I have been reading with interest Google's new target of hidden text and such in web pages. I applaude G for doing so, and I hope it works. But, as many people point out, depending on how this is implemented, it COULD adversely effect some people with legitimate web page use for some of these techniques...
OK, lets suppose we had a spider trap on our site... one can feed the trap a number of ways... a 1x1 gif, and empty href tag, other things. Obviously, I would have all of these paths excluded in robots.txt... so only "bad guys" would go there.
While not "hidden text" per se, this MIGHT be something that the new Google filter might pick up.
I was hoiping someone who might know could comment on this. While I do not think I should have to worry- if some of these do get "flagged" by the new G algo, and someone goes to "investigate" by hand, well, I would think it should pass muster, but I want to know!
thanks!
dave
I sure hope the threshold is very high or that there is a human review of "marginal" cases. Otherwise, my sister's hobby site with its hidden-link 1x1 GIF pointing to a hit-counter script is going to get banned! :o
Re: Spider trap links: Hopefully, Google will check the robots.txt again at this point and notice that the link is Disallowed - and thus provides no "unfair advantage" of any kind - It's meant to trap bad 'bots, not deceive search users!
I guess we're gonna find out how well-thought-out these filters are within a few weeks... Hope for the best!
Jim
Google boast about their objective of providing search on a very, very significant proportion of the web.
If they test-run their hidden text algo and find that it leaves them with only 2 pages of their index left then they'll pull back on the stringency.
Panic not!
I would also think that hiding a link to content that Googlebot has been excluded from wouldn't trip the filter. Since the goal of hiding links is to get additional content indexed by Google, it wouldn't make much sense to penalize a site that isn't trying to do that.
If that gets filtered, your going to see a huge amount of sites get dropped.
I would think the programmers at Google have figured out a way around this.
At least I hope!
>>> it wouldn't make much sense to penalize a site that isn't trying to do that
Exactly- but I want to make sure GG understands that, too!
I have no "hidden text" or doorway pages, nothing at all I am worried about.... except for my "hidden" links.
A LOT of people use the 1x1 gifs for a lot of things (enough people so that some security programs now routinely block "web bugs."
IN a VERY strict interpetation, these could be considered crossing the line. I want to make sure I am ok!
dave
-Lars
I have such a 1x1 gif on my main site. Presumably Google considered things like this. Setting the filters high enough that only lots of hidden links hit them would be one way around this.
