Comments on: Communication in other languages

By: Erwin

Erwin — Tue, 09 Feb 2010 14:26:02 +0000

I understand the need to protect the index but can someone give some advice how to work around this issue in the following case:
Im trying to show my users a list of products, each product has an image and text block.
Above the list there are 3 buttons and i use JS to change the dimentions of each product div.
button one only shows the image (4 columns), button 2 the image and a intro of the text block (2 columns), btn 3 shows everything in 1 column. At the moment the webpage defaults to btn 2, eg: there is more text in the div than the part im showing the visitors.
Im a correct to asume that google will penalize me for this?
eg: there are no ajax calls, all text info is loaded at the first request.

By: rené

rené — Fri, 23 Nov 2007 08:52:53 +0000

on the one side i think google takes a good job crawling stylesheets to show up hidden texts. but on the other side you are set blackhats and webmasters trying to build an accessible and usable site on the same level.

i hide content, yes. but i don’t hide it to push some keywords… it’s unnecessary for people who have healthy eyes and can see the layout i made. disabled users using a braile system need this extra texts… so how google will differ between those?

i will not build my website layouts on the guidelines of google… then it will looks like the crap i’ve using every day so if google thinks it’s god and can decide what’s good for users and what not so you will bring us back to html 4, frontpage made sites… thank you.

By: recep

recep — Mon, 23 Apr 2007 12:33:53 +0000

Hehehe, Very good job of yourself Matt, But l can say l also did these kinds of things in the beginning of the way to alert google that we can keep something from them or in that way, from users as well. l think we all did, As we mentioned how they became fimiliar, we are making them and if some1 gets more traffic we start complaing them l dont accept the policy of what they do, but l want to make i t visible that we all did it in our history one or more times. thanks..
l did here
http://www.warezworld.net Look at the footer but they are not very hidden :p

Very good article, its not very long time l have met with ur blog Matt, but l already read many of ur professional articles. thanks..

By: Elvis

Elvis — Wed, 18 Apr 2007 06:21:59 +0000

Google spoils those spammers.
If you are one of them, don’t worry. Google loves you!

By: Psychedelic Mooj

Psychedelic Mooj — Thu, 08 Mar 2007 00:37:09 +0000

What is Google’s policy for using hidden text for the use of ADA purposes? If a site contains a great deal of text within images and blind users accessing the site via screenreaders such as JAWS are able to view the content that contained within images. Would such a site be penalized for this?

By: Internet Marketing Watch

Internet Marketing Watch — Tue, 20 Feb 2007 16:22:42 +0000

It’s bunch of bulls, I reported three cases on google.com.hk and I still see the spamming sites with big piles of hidden div text ranking on top positions for so long! Google anti spam team seemed to do nothing about it.

details, please check out my post here:

http://elvis.hk/Google/Found-Spam-Sites-Of-Hong-Kong

By: Party Freak

Party Freak — Thu, 15 Feb 2007 14:08:11 +0000

It amazes me that Google even warns such scam artists and get them back in the index that fast.

By: Daniel again

Daniel again — Fri, 12 Jan 2007 14:50:03 +0000

Hi again, I had no answer before and I’m very curious still. Do you know whether I risk being penalised for having a couple of hidden headings (such as “Navigation” and Special Features”) which are there purely for accessibility purposes? I’m really looking forward to some kind of informed insight…

By: RaZ

RaZ — Fri, 22 Dec 2006 04:40:26 +0000

There are still a huge amount of sites that uses thise type of keyword spamming. I noticed droomhypotheek.nl finally got removed. The first complains on that site were in 2005 or so, and was indexed a week ago.

I’ve also seens a couple of sites that rank kinda high, simular to droomhypotheek site (which used noscript-tags), but then they use noframe-tags.

How about google just stops indexing noscript/noembed/noframes..

I removed 1 url from my site which was a href styled to display:none; which was a link to a html-type sitemap for all those search engines that don’t yet support sitemaps.

Ah well, good to read google is taking action on removing those spamming sites. Thmbs up on that

By: Shadow1980

Shadow1980 — Wed, 20 Dec 2006 15:03:40 +0000

Mauricio Quiros – The concern is really with content on a page that is deliberately hidden from a visitor but visible to search engines, in order to artificially try and boost ranks in the serps.
You want to avoid using any text that is hidden from visitors as let’s be fair – if your visitors don’t need to see it, it doesn’t have to be there at all

In the SES London Conference recently it was stated (I believe by Yahoo!) that there are legitimate reasons for using hidden text, but personally I would just try and avoid it altogether. It is much better making a site which doesn’t need to resort to such measures to overcome it’s technical problems.

Btw – there is nothing wrong with hiding some elements in css, as long as you are doing it for a legitimate design purpose and not to hide text, keywords and other elements that are not required for the structure of the page.