Forum Moderators: open

Message Too Old, No Replies

non spam uses of hidden text

surely Google won't ban me for this

         

annej

8:43 pm on Jul 30, 2003 (gmt 0)

WebmasterWorld Senior Member 10+ Year Member



I am converting one of my sites to CSS and have set things so Netscape 4
won't even pick up the style sheet. This leaves N4 users with a very basic
page. At the bottom of the page I've put a suggestion that they upgrade
their browser to see the page as it should look. In N4 is shows up well in
black text on white background. On the pages where the CSS works I've put
the upgrade suggestion in a color that matches the background image so it
doesn't show up at all if the page is working properly using CSS.

My concern is if this could get my site/page banned by Google. My impression
is that Google manually looks at pages reported with hidden text in which
case I don't imagine there would be any problem. If it is done using some
sort of automatic detection it could be a problem.

Any thoughts on this?

batdesign

10:10 pm on Jul 30, 2003 (gmt 0)

10+ Year Member



Easier way to do it without using colours:
use @import for main stylesheet for the new browsers
user link rel for basic stylesheet for old browsers

Create a P.hidden class with a display:none attribute and put your upgrade message in the P style="hidden" tag.

then new browsers (ns 4.6 upwards I think?) will get the @imported stylesheet and not see the message.
Old browsers will.

Google has no problem with display:none unless it's used to deliberately spam keywords, and even then, they don't seem to catch it often.

annej

4:56 am on Aug 7, 2003 (gmt 0)

WebmasterWorld Senior Member 10+ Year Member



Wow, Thanks! This solves the problem and is more flexable too. Thank goodness for css and your help.