Site with Hidden Texts Showing up in SERPS

The saga continues...

[paladin]

Continued from [webmasterworld.com...] -

Well it took about a month and a half, but that offending site I mentioned is no longer there.
site:www.domain.com returns zero results.

Looks like I spoke to soon. It is now about 40 days later and the site is back with the same old tricks - <font color=white>

This is disapointing - I want a qulity Google - not this garbage.

[Brett_Tabke]

There is no way short of running a page through a browser rendering engine and then sampling the screen to detect "hidden" text. Additionally, it could just be your browser itself.

Worry about what is in your control - your site!

[paladin]

Its just a personal annoyance. They were removed and now they are back with the exact same trick.

[Nikke]

I've been following an SEO site that used the practice of hidden links to a cloaked sitemap, and used the same technique on most of their clients' sites as well.

The SEO site was caught, and removed from Google's index. But only for a week. Then it re-appeared, all cleaned up.

I just can't understand how they could get back that soon. Meanwhile all their supporting sites still use the very same techniques. And so does most of their customers.

If Brett is right, and Google cannot catch this automagically, then Matt Cutts and his crew needs more resources.

[Chico_Loco]

Well - wasn't this one of the hypothesized reasons as to why they hired that firefox developer? Presumably they would get him to build a rendering engine that could integrate with their robots and determine advanced information about a page eg. item placements, hidden text etc..

[paladin]

wasn't this one of the hypothesized reasons as to why they hired that firefox developer?

if(browser==RegEx(IE versions) && RegEx(<font color>)==white && element bgcolor==white/none)
{
hidden text
}

[abates]

paladin: OK, now what happens if they use #fefefe and #fdfdfd for the text and background? :)

[paladin]

Hence the regular expression. It will take more than 5 minutes to get it right, but Google has been at it for years...

[simey]

Are'nt there like dozens of ways to do hidden text on a page? Css, Background .gif's, SS includes? etc.

[texasville]

After one of my rants about spam sites in jagger1 postings, Google Guy himself asked me to report it with my WW id in it and jagger. He told me he saw it and I made a textbook report. He agreed. The site had all kinds of hidden text keywords. It had ALL it's outgoing links in hidden text. It had a complete section of safety and usage of products it sells scraped directly from a Canadian government site. GG assured me it would be banned. It had been number one in google for a long time for almost any of the search terms it would be involved with. (PS: it almost certainly was buying links also).
Well, it was gone...about 45 days...it's back and it is ranking #1 again! And NO changes. And this category is rife with sites like that.
What is funny is this site does NOT rank well in Yahoo or MSN. HAH!
I feel alls I got was lip service from google. And this was all a public relations scam designed to diffuse dissent.
And yes Brett....I worry about my clients sites. Each and every day. I do well in every search engine but google. I have no REAL seo on my sites. Just good structure and content. It gets very frustrating to be ignored by google. Our sites don't buy links. Don't try to game. But it appears following the straight and narrow has no reward. And the black hats are winning.
I can't wait for Carl Icahn to get thru with Time Warner and take a run at google.

[topsites]

I must admit, the best traffic I got from google is while they were still growing...

The sad thing is, the blackhats get nothing but some free and untargeted traffic, the surfers leave the Internet (some for good), while the rest of us pay the price.

The good news is, what goes around must come around.

[Sparkys_Dad]

The rich are getting richer. There's a pretty good article on Google News today about some big name websites that use hidden text and links. Search for "hidden text"

I'd be interested to know if any of these guys are your competitors as it doesn't seem that anything is being done about it.

[thecityofgold2005]

Its just a personal annoyance. They were removed and now they are back with the exact same trick.

A similar thing has happened with a site in my sector. It came back a few weeks ago after having been removed post Jagger. It had done nothing to fix the blatant spam (interlinking mirrors, masses of bought links).

However, just today I notice that it's PR is back at 0 as part of the directory PR update.

I am fairly confident that it will be goodbye to some spammy friends once this PR/backlink update is complete.

[Brett_Tabke]

> Are'nt there like dozens of ways to do hidden
> text on a page? Css, Background .gif's, SS includes? etc.

Lets count the ways:

- inline css.
- external css.
- on the page.
- on the page in nested tables.
- in javascript.
- in javascript that calls a css.
- in a css error that causes ie to render wrong.
- gfx intentional overlays anyone?...

hehe.. that's just a start

[irishaff]

I blocked my competitors domains on my firewall whilst training myself to stop checking the competitions sites etc. Cold turkey was,, well sweaty...but im a lot better of for it now.

[Brett_Tabke]

brillant irishaff. Take care of home base, and everything will take care of itself.

[jcmoon]

If Brett is right, and Google cannot catch this automagically, then Matt Cutts and his crew needs more resources.

Didja try mentioning the site in a comment in his blog? Or is that generally not a good idea?

Also, it seems amusing that on the one hand, G seems to have the bandwidth & processing-power of God, in terms of what it's able to do when indexing and understanding the www, yet on the other hand, they don't have enough resources to figure out hidden text.

Sure, there are many ways it can be hidden when you're inspecting code ... but is visual inspection (by machine) not an option? Especially comparing visual inspection to a simple once through the code as well as once through the text on the page?

Or (perhaps more likely), does G simply not want to expend much energy going after hidden text?

Sure, it's true we shouldn't pay much attention to competitors, and it's equally true that we probably all belong to a large "free-search-engine-traffic-addicts-anonymous" group ... given that, our concerns are still reasonable, if perhaps misguided.