Hidden text and hidden layers and spam

[Jane_B]

Hi As always I need some informed opinion. I'm managing a whisky site. To make it comply with US regs the homepage needs to be very simple - little text, no through site links, and box for date of birth. European regs just need a Yes/No answer to legal drinking age in a pop-up box and will tolerate as much text as you want and links through site. To comply with US regs but still to be read and indexed by SEs my colleague has 2 suggestions. Commments of these would be welcome.
1 Use white text on white which would colour up when non-US user clicked Yes. Would this text be read by SES? Would this be considered hidden text? Would this be spam for which we may be banned?
2 Use hidden layer so that when non-US reader clicked yes the hidden layer would be visible. Would this text be read and indexed? Would it be spam?

[Nick_W]

1. Would this be spam for which we may be banned?

Yes, it's a naughty one and could be detected automatically (though I'm not certain)

2. People hide layers all the time in dhtml sites. This could be considered spam but it's far less likely that you'd get detected automatically. Just make sure that if you were someone at an SE manually looking at the page that it didn't seem spammy (stuffed with keywords and no real use to the user)...

Just my thoughts... ;)

Nick

[4eyes]

I'd use layers and an external style sheet for the positioning.

The text should be read and spidered OK

The danger is that you might get a hand inspection after being reported by a competitor.

As long as it doesn't look like you are trying to manipulate the engines, you should be OK.

[added]
u r just too damn quick, Nick

[Jane_B]

Hello again These are really useful comments and help me to make decisions. J