I was looking at the page-source of a page that i liked and came across this at the bottom: <h1 style="display:none;"......> HTML: Followed by about a page of keywords.. is this common? and, is this the type of thing that Google frowns upon?
If google finds a page with such thing, it sends you an email requesting the move of the ads (not keywords) from that page or ban you! Peace,
i thinks it is is used to hide something from people and search engines. It remains in your page but does not display.. thats it...
I think that is keyword stuffing which would be black hat as far as google is concerned, but may raise the page profile on several other search engines without incurring a problem. The thing you have to consider is the fact that if google penalizes you the the rest of them dont really matter as far as generating traffic to your site etc.
It is a common technique used to stuff keywords into a page that the search engines can read and the human visitors can't read
something like that, it would be blackhat yes because it's showing search engines something different than it is to the visitor. I use the H1 tag, but I use it clearly on the front of my pages so users can easily see what my page is about.
You might want to read this thread: http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/how-google-handles-hacked-sites/ A site got hacked with (ugly) links as display:none and was delisted from Google.
Style="display:none" is not in itself Blackhat. Using it for stuffing keywords is. Using it for hiding menu items like the quicklinks on every vBulletin forum, for example, is not going to get you banned.
Google will not ban you for (style="display:none"), I can't even understand why do you think that it will?
Read the first post which is the topic of this thread. They will ban you if you use it to stuff keywords or similar content.
It is my understanding that using any method of hiding content for the purpose of altering serps or rankings is "black hat" and can potentially result in problems.
True. I use it for generator forms on one of my sites to hide/show instructions and certain form sections. It is totally user controlled though, no hidden text for SERP purposes. In the example that the OP posted I would definitely say it was black hat SEO. Who hides h1 tags?
I used a <span> inside a <h1> to replace the text with an image (for a logo). The span had display: none; applied to it. I still don't know what search engines do about it. Does anybody have a definitive answer? Just to be safe, though, I'm going to use a regular <a> without the <h1>.