Hidden Text- Disadvantages
In this part of the Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) Manual, Position Gold Ltd will be looking at the disadvantages of having hidden text on a website. This is seen as being very bad on the websites part as the search engines deem the website to be practicing black hat and unethical techniques. Below are some examples of some types of hidden text, that is commonly practicsed by unethical Search Engine Optimisation agencies and unethical websites.
Text the same colour as the background
By having background text the same colour as the background or a very similar colour as the background, many people will not see it, however the search engines will see it and will read the text and will add all of the keywords to the search engine index.
Hiding text beneath images and background layers
By having text, such as this spammy example below, on your website, you are allowing the search engine spiders to crawl your site and index your site according to your websites’ content. However, this is a black hat method of SEO and should be avoided at all costs. Those who do this to a website would not just have this on full show, they place an image over the text so that the user cannot see it, but the search engines can.
Here we see the image (below) that has been placed over the text in order to hide the spammy content.
The Z index allows you to add layers to a website and webpage, this lets you have a layer of content and then a layer or image on top of it, making the content invisible to the user, but visible to the search engines.
Hidden divisions
By having a division of content on the website, that is fixed of screen and cannot be seen is a very crafty way of hiding content from users but is also a good way of getting unethical content crawled and indexed by the search engines. The image below, shows an example of hidden divisions. The grey area shows the viewable area of a webpage (E.g. 600 pixels), however, the hidden division contains spammy content and although it cannot be seen on the webpage, it can be seen by the spiders.
Hidden Text is a bad thing for any website to have and should be avoided as much as possible, the risks are just too big, as the search engines do not take kindly to websites who are practicing unethical and black hat techniques.
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