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The question that was raised in my mind on reading further on hidden text was how spiders would handle text that is the same color as the background but over the top of colored boxes. The editor I use sets everything up with CSS so make a colored box and then go back and drag some text over the top and it looks fine in either browser. My question is even though humans can see and read the text will the spiders realize the white text on a white overall page background has a blue colored box under it?
I could care less about "tricking" the search engines or spamming them but I would hate to get my sites banned for hidden text. The reason I even thought about it to begin with was I checked out my pages in Netscape 4.07 with CSS turned off and of course nothing was where I had "dragged and dropped" it. The white text that stood out like a sore thumb on the blue background with CSS turned on was now invisible off who knows where on the page :)
If anyone has an idea how the spiders handle CSS and if they "know" what they are seeing I would sure appreciate hearing your thoughts. I could just change the colors used but since I would still wonder later I figured I would use the forum and set myself straight on it if possible.
Ditto. Same colored text on the background, even though it is in a tabled colored cell box of a different color is considered a no-no. Too many people have spammed the search engines using same colored text on the background.
In fact, I know of one site that took the spam text and made it one pixel off of the background so it wouldn't be considered spam by the engine. That site is now banned as well.
The bottom line, don't do it.
Oh, welcome to the forums by the way.
-G
This is a tricky area and it's unfortunate that we have to compromise design to appease the SEs.
What I do is this (and I get flak for it but it is working for now ;)):
Set your background color to some obscure color you won't be using for text and then set your background to be a tiled image of the color you really want. Then go ahead and design away. The caveat here is that there are some who feel this is dangerous as well.
Good luck.
If it were just the 'visual' side of the results, I would agree. But, as it happens, I just spent 2 hours this weekend "de-coding" a wysiwyg generated page (Frontpage, I believe) and moving it to a site I had donated. The pages looked great on both IE5 and NS4, but when I looked at the code... Yeow!! Nested tables were the order of the day, image maps when a simple HREF would have done nicely, that sort of thing. In the end, I lightened the bandwidth burden by 40% without really trying too hard, bringing the content up a level in the tables to boot -ALL without making a change in the visual appeal of the site.
To be fair, I do not know what the original author forced the app to do and what it did on its own. However, if what I saw was anything near the usual output of wysiwygs, there are more SEO issues presented than css.
As far as wysiwyg editors ,there is no doubt the coding is bloated. My forays into "learning" html previously always entailed seeing something I liked and viewing source to bust it apart. Whenever it was done by a true html author I could find the parts I sought much easier and it was always in a more compact form easy to see what the author was working towards. Changing pre made templates also helped me learn what the code was doing.
Still ,just as all wysiwyg don't operate the same while using them to make a page ,they also don't put out the same results. Front Page is almost the worst for putting out chunky convoluted html based on the purely unscientific method of viewing ten zillion pages looking for tidbits to use in my own pages. WYSIWYG will probably never equal hand coding but honestly the amount of time I was sinking into pages to put out formatted text and a little design equalling this post was unreal. I wouldn't have anything to worry about at all as far as search engines because I would still be looking at a handful of pages wondering if I wanted to make that grand move of adding a .gif in a certain spot on the page. Then spending days till it actually hit that spot without contorting everything else on the page :)
Everything is a tradeoff I guess. If any other issues and potential problems besides CSS might crop up when it specifically comes to how search engines view the pages that WYSIWYG editors put out I will be all ears. I stumbled on the CSS thing checking my pages and figured after lurking this board off and on for months this would be the place to ask.
Thanks again for the feedback given already it is one less dark spot for me to take a wild guess on. :)
What I do is try to make sure that no matter what I have the body text set to, I try to do at least 32 numerical positions different. (Erm, so color is a hex number -#ffffff is the same as 256,256,256. Add up your color codes and then subtract or add atleast 32 to find a 'safe color'.)
I'm trying the same using a hidden layer with the layer tag immediately after the opening body tag, this layer contains <H1> tags, keywords, links etc - good spider food.
As the layer is hidden, the human visitor doesnt see this, but the SE spider should.
I'm trying out and monitoring results.
Anyone else tried this?
