Hidden Text and Google

A Theory

[liamgt]

Judging by the number of sites in the 1st page with spammy results and Hidden text etc etc, you would be normal to assume that this is something that Google are not focusing on. Add to this the fact that the Spam Report Seems to be a waste of time you would not be misplaced to assume that google does not care about these issues.

However, why would that be the case? GoogleGuy is a regular in here and obviously reads the gripes from everyone else regarding these issues. Surely its in the best interest of a major search engine such as Google to filter out these spammy results, so why are we still seeing these results? The reason in my opinion is as long as there are benifits to be made from cheating, people will do it. Look at the Athletics world as an example! Webmasters know they will get away with it(if only in the short term) and if they get caught they can easily start again. Google is doing a great job but for every site they ban for hidden links there will be 2 more going up in its place from somewhere around the world.

Google in my opinion still produce the most relevant results (bar none) of any of the search engines, even with the spammy results.

Just my 2 pence worth
Keep up the good work guys.

Liam

[tigger]

The Answer is you can play the hidden links spammy game so long as the domain is disposable, otherwise it's just to much of a risk

[jady]

Ive reported a competitor for 5 months now for using hidden text to achieve #1 spot - nothing!

[liamgt]

Jady,

Ive reported a couple myself with no joy, but i remember reading in one of the posts that GoogleGuy said to mention WebmasterWorld in the Report.

[fathom]

Ive reported a competitor for 5 months now for using hidden text to achieve #1 spot - nothing!

Just because you report something and nothing appears to happen doesn't mean nothing is happening.

It's very impractical for Google to hand pick spam out of 3 billion pages, hand grooming at this size is rather under-productive... therefore tweaks are attempted in their algo to do this for all similar pages/sites.

It is however a bit of a challenge, particularly if a pattern isn't apparent.

Be patience. ;)

[farside847]

Before I found this forum I had tried to make a full index page with a link to every product on our site. There was a link to this page from the main url that is grabbed by freshbot every day. This link was hidden (text same color as background). It was like that for almost two months and it was never grabbed by eithor bot. It was not until I found this forum that I was able to make a system of pages that Google would index.

So, google does check for this type on hidden stuff anyway, and ignores it.

thanks
Shawn

[jomaxx]

It seems to me that Google doesn't issue automated penalties for hidden text. They probably have to manually check flagged pages because the spider simply doesn't have enough information to know whether text is invisible or not. There could be a background image, some CSS formatting, or maybe other things going on such as Javascript or DIV tags, that result in text being clearly readable.

Google may well have designed logic into their algorithms to downplay or ignore anything they think is spammy text, but I can't recall a case where a site was mistakenly penalized for hidden text that was actually clearly visible.