As long as they are at it....

Let webmasters get the benefit too..

[abcdef]

It seems that the craziness this month this month is at least in part caused by Google's need (understandably) to automate QC on search relevancy as much as they can, too reduce manual(to be read human and labor and slow and expensive) involvement wherever possible in the QC process.

In the process of automated policing, there are a few innocent parties that will get caught in the middle.

for instance. we run white text internal navigation links on our home page, set agains a blue background table, which is against a while background page. Will we get banned for "invisible text" though the text is not invisible? (anybody got an answer?)

Google should share the wealth of its algos. - just a tadd-for everybody's benefit:

provide an automated tool so both new and experienced web masters can test a URL of their choice from their web, under the current algos of the day, to insure against banning....
and, if a URL would be banned, than say why.....

wouldn't that help both Google and potentially innocent webmasters at the same time, make automated QC that much better?

[deft_spyder]

I don't think so... it would make it a SEO fiesta for exploiting the algorythm and destroying results. There's been a few threads on this same topic just recently with seniors giving well thought out answers.

[mrguy]

--for instance. we run white text internal navigation links on our home page, set agains a blue background table, which is against a while background page. Will we get banned for "invisible text" though the text is not invisible? (anybody got an answer?)--

That is not invisible. Why would you get banned?

I'm sure the HTML interpetor for the Algo can clearly see the white text code against the blue nested in a table and not against the main background. The programmers at Google are pretty talented at what they do and I'm sure they have thought of that. (At least I hope they have!)

We do the same thing as I think many other sites do as well.

[edited by: mrguy at 10:49 pm (utc) on May 9, 2003]

[WebGuerrilla]

A Google Spam Validator...

Now that would be fun.

[steve128]

You will not get banned for using white text on a blue background.
End of story, ie the text is not hidden.

[GoogleGuy]

You wouldn't get in trouble for what you described, abcdef.

[BigDave]

I've said it many times. If you can think up a simple case in 5 minutes, you can be sure that the hundreds of engineers at google will have a pretty good chance of thinking of the same thing in the months that they are working on a solution and doing QA on it before sending it live.

The reason that there was no real hidden text detection before now, is that it IS tough to do it right. Corner cases would be a real B!+@# and they will take as many of those into account as they can. Your case isn't even a corner case, it's a common case.

[markdidj]

I was worried about the same thing, so to be sure I set the background color of the text as well. That way no mistakes can be made.

[Clark]

I was just browsing through two cases where invisible text was present, yet not meant to be spammy. One was a forum that has the ability to use color in the message text and a user hid some text to be cute in his signature. The other case was a movie review where the spoiler used hidden text.

[why2kit]

ok GoogleGuy, In the past I have made the mistake of putting up white text on a white background - not trying to spam - just being an idiot with his colour scheme - and I fixed it before I got caught.

but to this day I still put comments in my html (using <!-- comment -->) to check on my dynamic page creation - is that spam?

[hutcheson]

>I've said it many times. If you can think up a simple case in 5 minutes, you can be sure that the hundreds of engineers at google will have a pretty good chance of thinking of the same thing in the months that they are working on a solution and doing QA on it before sending it live.

Keep saying it. Maybe it will sink in someday.

Google doesn't hire dummies. They hire math PhD's. These are the guys who help rocket scientists with their most difficult problems. They aren't perfect, of course -- anybody can see when the rockets blow up (as they do occasionally), but it is not likely that just anyone can provide useful help and advice fixing the problem.

>I was worried about the same thing, so to be sure I set the background color of the text as well. That way no mistakes can be made.

This is standard advice to anyone building a webpage: make sure the CSS degrades gracefully. It makes the page more likely to be interpreted correctly by broken browsers (and, sigh, what other kind are there?) as well as less-than-omniscient spiders (that is, all of them.)

[markdidj]

"Maths PhD's. These are the guys who help rocket scientists"

So what. This is the internet, which changes by the day. It only needs 1 fresh mind not filled with old programming ways to start a new idea.......

[GoogleGuy]

why2kit, you wouldn't get in trouble for this. It wouldn't help much either though..

[why2kit]

It isn't for spamming it's so I could work out which records get pulled from my database (sloppy programming!)

[abcdef]

thank you GG.

on the second point, hey what the heck, nothing lost by asking. hahaha

[rumirunto]

Since people are asking about what is spam and what is not, here are a couple that I use and that I'm unsure about wether Google might dislike.

Some of my internal pages have links to internal pages to which I do not want to assign any Search Engine Mojo. (privacy.html, contactwebmaster.html, etc) Those links are printed out via Javascript. I orignally just had those pages excluded in robots.txt, but I added the javascript since I have no idea how google handles PR from links going to excluded pages. (Does this PR just "evaporate", or are those links ignored when allocating outbound PR from a page?)

The second one: My site is a search engine of Widget providers. The first thing users see is a search form that posts into a search page that returns a set of listings. Since Google is obviously not going to enter search criteria and post from the form, I have a link to an /all_listings.html page hidden in a <div> block. That way I make sure that search engines find all my Widget listings.

Googleguy: could you comment on these? I've been so hammered on the -sj results that I'm now a bit paranoid and wonder if the above two techniques have something to do with it.

[HenryUK]

rumirunto

As far as your second technique is concerned, I don't know the official answer, but I have a similar site and I have a straightforward link from the home page to the listings. I also put up a message on these pages advising visitors to return to the search form, giving them a link to do so.

This has saved me a lot of worrying! If any of my users choose to ignore the message and go the long way around rather than using the much quicker and more efficient form, that's up to them...

Don't forget that Google's algorithms are not smart enough (yet!) to look into the webmaster's conscience to see if it is clean! For now, if it looks like a spam technique - even if done with the best intentions - there's every chance it's going to land you in trouble.

[depthcharge]

Hello GG,

If we can assume the future algo is going to automatically remove sites from the index that have things like hidden text will it also automatically restore those sites when they remove said offending text?

[pmac]

>restore those sites when they remove said offending text? <

At Pubcon in Boston, Matt Cutts said that was the plan.