My friend owns a locksmiths website and found that his main competitor has hiden text, mostly H1 tags at the base of his index page. After reporting this to Google about 20 times in a period of six months the guys at Google have done nothing, what can this mean?
This means that any day now he's going to get banned or penalized, hidden text to trick Google is a BIG no no. It's like balancing a knife on your eye. This is common knowledge and has been for a few years now.
Yep, invisible text is a big no no...Google should do something about it...but if it's been 6 months....well looks like they're very slack.
There are no exact rules for SEO. I have also added some hidden links in my sites but Google penalized to one of my site and nothing happen to others but presently i removed all hidden links. Hope he will penalized soon by Google.
That is an attempt at 'blackhat' SEO, and is a complete no-no. There are still some getting away with it, but it will eventually come back to haunt them.
Uh, there are some exact rules for SEO. Such as doing anything Matt Cutts says you're not allowed to do will get you penalized. Simple.
ok I understand and in the mean time people that are paying SEO companies to get to Top 10 in the natrul listings have to suffer while a cheat benfits right.. This is very wrong. Is there no direct way of contacting Google to inform them of this?
The only place where anything should be "invisible" is the meta-tags that are used by some search engines to categorize your site. Even then, a lot of search engines will respond badly if there is too much text, or it looks like it is being abusive or inaccurate. Basically, the tags are there for a reason, and should only have a handful of words in them.
Yeah.. i've been banned by google for a couple days, then i contact them from google webmaster and delete my hidden text as their suggestion.