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Maybe you could use a MouseOver effect or title attribute (tooltip) when hovering over a word or an image? There are many more ways to go about it..
Damian, that is assuming hand reviews. A filter probably doesn't distinguish between good and bad. It gets triggered or not.
There are many ways to hide text but let's take some examples:
body bgcolor is set to white, and there is text on the page that is white (determined by google through font tags or by retrieving the stylesheet or parsing the .css tags)
At that point Google stuill does not know there is not a table on the page that actually has black bgcolor (could be set in the stylesheet or in html) perfectly showing the white text?
You do not even know where the white text on the page is shown (is it positioned by css for example?)
Best Google can do is flag this page as a potential page using hidden text and apply the next test in the filter.. I meant to suggest that would be seeing if this particular white text is natural text or a row of keywords.. Google may of course decide to do something else to follow up their test but I mean to say it's likely to be a multi-test filter.
If they wanted to blanket ban any possible hidden text we would have seen it a long time ago I think.
Frankly there are a lot of ways to achieve much the same effect, and I would choose one that didn't involve hidden text. Or simply META NOINDEX the quiz pages. You probably don't need them indexed anyway.
Set the body background to black. Make a background image that is solid white, 100x100 pixels or so. Make your hidden text white.
I'm not sure if they can tell what color a jpg image is, perhaps someone would like to comment on this.
it is trivial to tell what color a .jpg is, you just look at it, or in the case of Google have the software render it and "look" at it.
You can assume that any "very simple way" to get past google's algo has been considered by those inside google.
They have not had automatic hidden text detection till now *because* it is not a simple problem. The reason they are starting to use it is because they now believe they have it right. Having it right includes taking into account CSS, JavaScript, HTML and images.
It may not take into account the very rare legitimate use of hidden text containing the answers to quizzes. but google does make clear in their guidelines that they do not like hidden text and therefore there is no reason to expect to be included even if you have a legitimate use.
If you want to try the JPG trick and report back here whether or not it works after fileing a spam report on your own page, please feel free. Just do not suggest that it will get past the algo without testing it first.
I'll grant that my competitor may have just started this practice, in which case they will get booted off soon, but I'm inclined to wonder if they haven't been doing this since day one and the whole hidden text thing is a myth.
I was reading in the Google FAQ here the answer to the question "What is Spam?" and it didn't seem to indicate that hidden text was considered spam by Google. I'm not able to re-locate that point at this moment, but if there is interest in it, I'll keep looking.
I'm not willing to risk it with my client's sites, but I find the concept interesting. I think that I'll just keep an eye on my competitor. If they continue on in the top ranked position now that I know that they use hidden text, I think that maybe in a few months I may join them.
Jabzebedwa
Try checking this competitor using archive.org.
Unfortunately, whether these penalties are automatic, manual due to detection via filters, or manual due to spam reports, is hard to say.
Did you say you filed a spam report with Google?
If you found something obviously spam, I wouldn't wait for the algo to take care of it.
Anyways, I wonder if Google has that built into the algo too. That is, if they see some hidden text and it's not just keywords and the page also contains (control-a) or something similar they know it's just a quiz or something and don't penalize?
Just some thoughts...
I was mistakened in implying that I knew that this was a valid way to get past Google's new algo. I have seen this method used successfully in the past. I have never used any sort of hidden text because I do not want to jeopardize my rankings. I will, however, take your advice and test this theory on a throwaway domain.
However, why would I report myself for Spam? Any algorithm could be assisted by self-policing.
Just place a small image or something in those brackets with an alt attribute
Seems the safest and easiest way to go :)
Just thought i'd add my vote ;)
No, I haven't filed a spam report with Google. I guess I'm not sure this is spam. I have a feeling that this is fairly benign. It is of interest to me that they have ruled supreme for sometime in this industry utilizing this technique when Google claims it boots sites off that use it. But I don't think that the good ranking of my competition is due to this technique. He probably has a better site overall in Google's eyes. I would imagine that at the very least Google ignores this technique.
The Google Knowledge base here says:
It has been our experience that 90 to 95 percent of the "spam" that has been reported in Google search results is not spam at all. There is no real way of knowing what Google considers to be problem search results or site areas.
A few things we do know that are not neccessarily problems with Google:
Keyword Stuffing:
The most often misreported and least understood "spam" with Google. Google's algo is based on PageRank which counts the numbers and quality of inbound links to a page. Thus, keyword stuffing that is prevalant with other search engines, has no major decernable affect on Google. Minor and longer phrases were there are limited results may have some small impact, but not enough to report it as spam.
Jabzebedwa
Pat
Is this considered hidden text or just ignored?
Ed
What I gleaned from that:
1) Conventional wisdom dictates to not do this - most people think search engines ignore the tags, but a se that read them would be likely to exact a penalty for this.
2) Some reports of competitors who had a high ranking getting away with this tactic.
My conclusion is that in my case the potential risk outweighs any marginal advantage gained by these tags, and any advantage gained would likely be short lived.
Any experts out there have any insight into this?
Ed
