Placeholder text - boiler plate nightmare ?

[Whitey]

We've just discovered a whole heap of hidden placeholder text in Latin across asite on a site audit. e.g. " At vero eos et accusamus "

How dangerous is it for getting filtered / penalised ? And does WMT normally report this , as it didn't in this case.

We're working frantically to get it removed - I've no idea what damage it has caused and how long it has been going on for.

[Whitey]

For those unfamiliar with placeholder text here's a reference : [en.wikipedia.org...]

[TheMadScientist]

AFAIK Boilerplate text is usually discounted from ranking calculations, but not a 'penalty' in and of itself, and in some (most) situations, IMO it's a good thing they are using it, because it removes 'off topic' content from the ranking calculations... Others may have different experiences, and I'm sure to some extent it could (would) depend on what it is, EG a viagra boilerplate detected may be treated differently than a copyright boilerplate, but I would say repeated text in-and-of-itself is not a huge 'red flag' causing 'filtering' or a 'penalty'.

I don't know what your quote says, but it may be it had little to no impact whatsoever.

[Whitey]

An excerpt from the 240k product related pages has this type of hidden text : " "accusamus et iusto odio dignissimos "

On the web for this phrase Google is providing 2.9m occurrences.

There are 160 words per page out of a total of approximately 500 - 750 and it appears in paragraphs that follow h3 headings - so a relevancy signal has ( i assume ) been sent to Google. The placeholder text is very widely used and evident on the web.

As you likely know a lot of noise was made here [webmasterworld.com...] and here at Google [googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com...]

My concern is that Google will say " Hey , this site is in progress or of low quality , let's mark it down in the algo or throw out the pages " , in the same way if the site was " Under Construction " with placeholder text.

I bet this is a common error out there on sites and I'm keen to hear views while the mess is cleaned up .

[tedster]

hidden placeholder text in Latin

How was it hidden? The "hidden" factor is more likely to attract a penalty than the "boilerplate" or duplicate factor.

[Whitey]

It's only visible in the " view source" , so i assume it's picked up by Google since it shows under the site: tool operator

The text appears in a section after this ( i don't know CSS / HTML ) , so i hope i've identified the correct information :

<div id="divWidgetRed" style="visibility:visible;display:none">

WidgetRed is my fictious input . i'm embarrassed to say it went on for over a year , but it's not my role to check code ( maybe i should more often ! )

Actually , i just picked up on Matt Cutts blog [mattcutts.com...]

Hmm. “Insert your hidden text here. Do not forget to [embiggen] your keywords.” I don’t recommend that people use CSS to hide text, and I don’t recommend that they document it, either.

I'm not sure if this is in the same context as this predicament though ... any ideas ?

[tedster]

It depends what else is happening in the code elsewhere on the page. For example, if there is JavaScript that switches "display:none" to "display:block" on a click or hover behavior, then your code is something like what creates those hove menus and it would be fine.

But if no user action makes the trext visible on-page, then it truly is hidden. If it was important keywords the site could be penalized for hidden text, just as Matt was discussing there.

[Whitey]

Do you think that Google would consider the page lower quality ( as Adam Lasnik described a few years back on his duplicate content article ) in it's algo if it didn't warrant a penalty ?

There's one more thing that scares me - i notice that these product pages interlink , and that placeholder text is on each of those pages . Now if thats internal i guess that's OK - Y/N ? But might it trigger a similar page filter or take them out of the index?

One thing i do notice from the site:tool ( shame it's not working properly at the moment ) is the number of pages shown as indexed is quite low with this text.

[tedster]

It's hard to say what might be going on with the algorithm. most likely hidden text just gets ignored until it starts to help a URL rank on a competitive term - but that's just my guess.

What you found certainly isn't helping at any rate, so I'd just clean it up and discover whether that improves anything.

[TheMadScientist]

I wouldn't be as concerned about the text or such a small amount of text being hidden on a page as I would be about HOW and WHY? If you didn't put it there someone did... How and why did they do it?

[Whitey]

I've no idea .

It's a good question which has been asked of the previous digital agency and their QA procedures over the last year -or lack of it. Such a visible amount of text in the "view source" should have been picked up.

We'll have to see if the removing of it yesterday makes any difference over the next few weeks.