Automotive SEO - Car Dealer Website Marketing Firm > Hidden Text

Hidden Text in Search Engine Optimization

Hidden Text is the practice of keeping text hidden from human visitors, while readable for search engines spiders that visit the page. Often hidden text is used in combination with overt keyword stuffing in order to help the website in reaching higher search engine rank.

Hidden text is a black-hat seo strategy that is effective when used properly. Hidden Text is one of the most common of these techniques and often is the first taste of black-hat that most webmasters stumble upon, often without their knowing of the penalties and the fact that search engines are keen to find those who use it.

Hidden Text for SEO: Ineffective Methods

Hiding Text with Colors

The novice webmaster looks at his cracked copy of Frontpage 98 and realizes, "hey if I change the text on this page to WHITE, and match the background, I can make this page rank super high with lots of keywords.

Well maybe if you make the text visible, just a nice shade of translucent grey? This is the same, probably worse because then it looks like you knew it was wrong nut were trying to skate by.

You'd probably have better luck sending letters to Google's engineers telling them why your website deserves #1 ranking for your keywords. Either way I wouldn't hold your breath.

Hidden Text Box

Ooops. What's that. About 30 pages of keywords displaced nicely in a tiny hidden text box. Effective until your caught, which using this method wouldn't take long at all. I imagine google has developed an algorithim to recognize that text boxes 10x5 in size that contain 50k in text probably aren't legit.

Read More Below Text

I would consider this more grey. I've seen many popular mainstream websites now getting away with a "read more" anchor that opens up additional text in an area below. The entire text is of course readable by the search engine, but nicely hidden until the visitor opens it up.... that is "if" they open it up.

Not sure what the result on this will be. It's gained widespread acceptance among Automotive SEO companies, mainstream news websites, etc. In the case of Car Dealer websites they tend to fly under the radar so grey techniques are more liberally used. The real test will be to see how Google and others start to react to this as the practice becomes more common.

Flash Stuffing

Another tactic rising in popularity, a small flash file or header loaded with text in the background. The idea being you can optimize a website a flash website that would otherwise be unreadable. I know of many websites that are stuffing heavily with flash and have had little consequence.. yet. Time will tell on this one as Google and the others begin to improve their algorithim reading flash.

As Always.. Buyer beware, play with fire, get burned. Be safe.