Would invisible text be allowed for this...

[yirmumah]

I run a daily webcomic, and I've noticed other webcomics actually post the script to their comics on the page with it blended with the background, example, white text on white background. It's just the dialogue that already appears in the comic image, making it actually searchable by google, and no to mention if you do a strip about a subject, and having ads appear on that subject.

I had heard invisible text was a no-no, but in this case, would it be permitted? I also heard that the google program ignores pages with invisible text or flags them for inspection.

I e-mailed Google about this, but I wanted to see if anyone here knew anything. I used the search but didnt find anything pertaining to this.

[ncreegan]

Why not just use regular text? No rules against that and it actually has a reason for being on the page.

[peewhy]

I e-mailed Google about this, but I wanted to see if anyone here knew anything. I used the search but didnt find anything pertaining to this.

What did google advise?

[yirmumah]

I haven't heard back from google yet.

Having the dialogue visible in just text form might have to do, but looks kinda tacky, since its already in the strip graphic.

[vordmeister]

The image alt attribute was invented for doing just what you describe - describing the content of an image for those who cannot see the image.

[diamondgrl]

Googlebot is an automated creature. It's not going to come to your site and say, "Ah, it's a comics site. In this case, it's a pretty good idea to make the text invisible."

Instead, it's going to apply its invisible text filter. What that means exactly - whether your page disappears altogether from SERPs or it is just downgraded or the invisible text is not counted - I'm not sure.

[bbkid]

this caused me to think about a site i'm working on. its in G because i have a link to the beta from my main site.

this new site has a comments div after each post thats hidden by default (display:none) and becomes visible when a javascript link is clicked. G not only indexed the page, but part of the text from a hidden div appeared in the search preview

It may be that it recieved manual inspection, I'm not certian. the page has been up for over a month with me working on either the front or back end every few days

[yirmumah]

Well, I'm going to play it safe for now. The ALT image text file I don't think works properly. And besides that, I wouldn't want it to display all the text from one comic on a hover from IE. That would be yucky and get in the way.

What I've decided to do, is not have the text match the background, but it's still pretty dark enough to not stand out and look ugly, and it's font size is "1". Looks more like copyright info now I guess.

This may explain why a few of my friends with webcomics who are doing this aren't seeing as good of results as I am-- so I'm gonna give them the heads up on this about the SERPS thing.

[ann]

why not find some DHTML for tool tips and use that?

[Nikke]

And besides that, I wouldn't want it to display all the text from one comic on a hover from IE.

If you use the title attribute as well, with a text like "todays comic", the IE users (and everyone else) will get that one instead.