Is this grey hat or black hat ?

I've been looking around at a few sites lately that are powered by an 'SEO site builder' tool and they appear to achieve good rankings by hiding a portion of very keyword-rich text between the <noscript> and </noscript> tags.

In other words only the SE spiders and browsers without JavaScript enabled will see this. You can see an example here: http://www.visitcardiff.com or http://www.bathroom-design-online.co.uk - just toggle JavaScript on and off and hit refresh.

To my mind this is black-hat because it's cloaking. Or is it more grey hat because I thought cloaking was where you present a completely different version of the site to the SE's ?

 

Yes, I'd put that in the black hat category. If theyv were a competitor of mine I'd report them.

 

Thought so - as you can see they appear to be quite a large company too.

 

Why don't they just put good content in the normal page? Its basically hidden text but the noscript tag is a very powerful way to give content to search engines. I use it to great effect if sites need a drop down menu or something.

 

I agee, 90% of the black hat that I see can be done just as easily through white hat methods, plus you don't have to start new sites every 6 months because you've been banned.

 

Anytime you deliberately attempt to show the SE spiders one thing and users something different it's Blackhat. So this qualifies - it's like putting the content into a hidden CSS DIV.

-Ramprof

 

Well stated!







Best wishes,
Kimmy

 

Cool! Black-hat but still indexed by Google huh?

 

i n totally agree with rampof

 

I lean towards the side that says it's a lot more about intent than what exactly is being done. If you are doing something for a legitimate reason (like a reasonable length rollover menu),then you should be considered to exist on the white hat side. If you're doing things SOLELY to game and trick the system, then it's clearly black hat tactics. Basically, it's hard to have the whole conversation if it's only about "hidden text".

So, can anyone come up with a real/good/legitimate reason for them to do what they are doing? (aside from pushing rankings of course)

 

I agree. You should report about it. Thank goodness to Google Panda!

 

It is obviousely black or gray hat SEO, this kind of website should be report to Google.

 

This thread was started in 2006...

 

It a Black Hat SEO which is against the guideline of search engines.

 

looks black hat to me. many of us seem to agree just by checking at the comments in this thread.

 

Are you talking about the site now or in 2006 when this thread was made??

I've got no idea why someone chose to drag this 6 year old thread back to life, and then everyone else jumping on the bandwagon, calling the current site blackhat.

Because TODAY (in 2012):

www.visitcardiff.com looks completely whitehat to me.
www.bathroom-design-online.co.uk is parked

Seems like no one even bothered to look at the site.